The Phenomenon of Man

About the Author

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was born in France
and ordained a Jesuit priest in 1911. Trained as a paleontologist,
Teilhard did research at Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle
in Paris and fieldwork in China, where in 1929 he codiscovered
the celebrated "Peking Man" fossils. In his writings, he sought
to reconcile his spiritual and scientific beliefs, producing a
vision of man as evolving toward the divine. His unorthodox
theological positions were at odds with Catholic doctrine and
led to a strained relationship with Jesuit leaders, who forbade
him from publishing his writings. The Phenomenon of Man
became a bestseller when it was posthumously published in
France in 1955.

Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) was one of the twentieth
century's leading evolutionary biologists. Among his numerous
distinctions, Huxley was the first director general of the United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) and cofounder of the World Wildlife Fund.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

i

WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY SIR JULIAN HUXLEY

HARPERPERENNIAL ■> MODERNTHOUCHT

NfW YORK • LONDON • TORONTO • SVDNtv • N t W DtLHI • AUCKLAND

Contents

INTRODUCTION BY SIR JULIAN HUXLEY page II

PREFACE 29

foreword: Seeing 31

BOOK ONE: BEFORE LIFE CAME

chapter I. The Stuff of the Universe 39

1. ELEMENTAL MATTER 40

A. Plurality 40

b. Unity 41

c. Energy 42

2. TOTAL MATTER 43

A. The System 43

B. The Totum 44
c. The Quantum 45

3. THE EVOLUTION OF MATTER 46

A. The Appearance 47

b. The Numerical Laws 50

chapter 11. The Within of Things 53

1. EXISTENCB 54

2. THE QUALITATIVE LAWS OP GROWTH 58

A. First Observation 58

B. Second Observation S9

C. Third Observation 60

3. SPIRITUAL ENERGY 62

A. The Problem of the Two Energies 63

b. A Line of Solution 64

CONTENTS
CHAPTER ill. The Earth in its Early Stages

1. THE WITHOUT

a. The Crystallising World

b. The Polymerising World

2. THE WITHIN

BOOK TWO: LIFE
chapter I. The Advent of Life

1. THE TRANSIT TO LIFE

a. Micro-organisms and Mega-molecules

b. A Forgotten Era

c. The Cellular Revolution

2. THE INITIAL MANIFESTATIONS OF LIFE

A. The Milieu

b. Smallness and Number

c. The Origin of Number

D. Inter-relationship and Shape

3. THE SEASON OF LIFE

chapter 11. The Expansion of Life

1. THE ELEMENTAL MOVEMENTS OF LIFE

A. Reproduction

b. Multiplication

c. Renovation

d. Conjugation

e. Association

f. Controlled Additivity

a corollaiy: the ways of life

2. THB RAMIFICATIONS OF THE LIVINC MASS

A. Aggregates of Growth

b. The Flourishing of Maturity

c. Effects of Distance

3. THE TREE OF LIFE

A. The Main Lines

b. The Dimensions

c. The Evidence

67
68
68
70

71

77

79
81

83
86

90
90

91
92

94

96

103
104
104
104
105
106
106
108

109

112

"3
116
119

122
122
131
"37

CONTENTS

chapter in. Demeter 141

1. ariadnb's thread 142

2. the rise of consciousness 147

3. the approach of time 152

BOOK THREE: THOUGHT

chapter I. The Birth of Thought 163

1. THE THRESHOLD OF REFLECTION 164

A. The Threshold of the Element: the Hominisa-

tion of the Individual 164

b. The Threshold of the Phylum: the Hominisa-

tion of the Species 174

C. The Threshold of the Terrestrial Planet:

The Noosphere 180

2. THE ORIGINAL FORMS 184

chapter 11. The Deployment of the Noosphere 191

1. THE RAMIFYING PHASE OF THB PRE-HOMINIDS 191

2. THB GROUP OF THE NEANDERTHALOIDS 197

3. the Homo Sapiens complex 200

4. THE NEOLITHIC METAMORPHOSIS 203

5. THB PROLONGATIONS OF THB NEOLITHIC

AGB AND THB RISB OF THB WBST 206

chapter in. The Modern Earth 213

1. THE DISCOVERY OF EVOLUTION 2l6

A. The Perception of Space-time 216

b. The Envelopment in Duration 219

c. The Illumination 221

2. THE PROBLEM OF ACTION 226

A. Modem Disquiet 226

B. The Requirements of the Future 229
c The Dilemma and the Choice 232

BOOK FOUR: SURVIVAL

chapter I. The Collective Issue 2,37

I. THE CONFLUENCE OF THOUGHT 239

A. Forced Coalescence 239

b. Mega-Synthesis 243

CONTENTS

2. THB SPIRIT OF THE EARTH

A. Mankind

b. Science

c. Unanimity

chapter ii. Beyond the Collective: the Hyper-Personal

1. THE CONVERGENCE OF THE PERSON AND

THE OMEGA POINT

A. The Personal Universe

B. The Personalising Universe

2. LOVB AS ENBRGY

3. THE ATTRIBUTES OF THB OMEGA POINT

CHAPTER III. The Ultimate Earth

1. PROGNOSTICS TO BE SET ASIDE

2. THE APPROACHES

A. The Organisation of Research

b. The Discovery of the Human Object

c. The Conjunction of Science and Religion

3. THB ULTIMATB

epilogue : The Christian Phenomenon

I. AXES OF BELIEF

2. EXISTENCE-VALUB

3. POWER OF GROWTH

postscript : The Essence of the Phenomenon of Man

1. A WORLD IN INVOLUTION

2. THB FIRST APPEARANCE OF MAN

3. THB SOCIAL PHENOMENON

appendix: Some Remarks on the Place ami Part of Evil in a World
in Evolution

INDEX

245
245
248
251

254

257
257
260

264
268

273
274
276
278
280
283

285

291
292
294
296

300
300
302
3<H

311

314

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Perhaps a word may be permitted about some of the lesser pro-
blems involved in the translation of this book.

The author's style is all his own. In some instances he coins
words to express his thought — ' hominisation', for instance, or
noosphere ' — and in others he adapts words to his own ends, as
when he talks of the ' within ' and the ' without ' of things. His
meaning, however, should become apparent as his thought un-
folds, and I have dispensed with cumbrous efforts at defining his
terms.

As far as possible I have dispensed with italics for his neo-
logisms—they are repeated too often to stand italicisation in a
work already thickly sprinkled with italics for emphasis. I have
also, in obedience to the conventions of typography in England,
eliminated the author's initial capitals for all abstract nouns such
as 'science ', ' life ', ' thought ', and also for ' world ', ' universe ',
' man ' and other such key-words of his work. There were dis-
advantages in this decision, but at least the printed page looks
more normal to the English reader.

A number of people nave contributed to the translation, some
by substantial paper work, others by suggestions ; and the out-
come is in a sense a joint effort. Outstanding among partici-
pants are Mr. Geoffrey Sainsbury, Dr. A. Tindell Hopwood,
Professor D. M. MacKinnon and Mr. Noel Lindsay. At times
versions or suggestions have been conflicting and I have had to
take it on myself to make an editorial decision. The translators'
notes appear in square brackets. I should Like to thank my wife,
without whom it would have been impossible to produce this
version. Finally, I must take on myself responsibility for the
inadequacies that still persist,

BERNARD WALL

Introduction by Sir Julian Huxley

The Phenomenon of Man is a very remarkable work by a very
remarkable human being. Pere Teilhard de Chardin was at the
same time a Jesuit Father and a distinguished palaeontologist. In
The Phenomenon of Man he has effected a threefold synthesis — of
the material and physical world with the world of mind and
spirit ; of the past with the future ; and of variety with unity,
the many with the one. He achieves this by examining every fact
and every subject of his investigation sub specie evolutionis, with
reference to its development in time and to its evolutionary
position. Conversely, he is able to envisage the whole of know-
able reality not as a static mechanism but as a process. In conse-
quence, he is driven to search for human significance in relation
to the trends of that enduring and comprehensive process ; the
measure of his stature is that he so largely succeeded in the search.
I would like to introduce The Phenomenon of Man to English
readers by attempting a summary of its general thesis, and of
what appear to me to be its more important conclusions.

I make no excuse for this personal approach. As I discovered
when I first met Pere Teilhard in Paris in 1946, he and I were on
the same quest, and had been pursuing parallel roads ever since
we were young men in our twenties. Thus, to mention a few
signposts which I independently found along my road, already
in 1913 I had envisaged human evolution and biological evolution
as two phases of a single process, but separated by a ' critical
point ', after which the properties of the evolving material
underwent radical change. This thesis I developed years later in
my Uniqueness of Man, adding that man's evolution was unique
in showing the dominance of convergence over divergence : in

11

INTRODUCTION

the same volume I published an essay on Scientific Humanism (a
close approximation to Pere Teilhard's Neo-Humanism), in which
I independently anticipated the tide of Pere Teilhard's great book
by describing humanity as a phenomenon, to be studied and
analysed by scientific methods. Soon after the first World War,
in Essays of a Biologist, I made my first attempt at defining and
evaluating evolutionary progress.

In my Romanes Lecture on Evolutionary Ethics, I made an
attempt (which I now see was inadequate, but was at least a
step in the right direction) to relate the development of moral
codes and religions to the general trends of evolution ; in 1942,
in my Evolution, the Modem Synthesis, I essayed the first compre-
hensive post-Mendelian analysis of biological evolution as a
process : and just before meeting Pere Teilhard had written a
pamphlet entitled Unesco : its Purpose and Philosophy, where I
stressed that such a philosophy must be a global, scientific and
evolutionary humanism. In this, I was searching to establish an
ideological basis for man's further cultural evolution, and to
define the position of the individual human personality in the
process — a search in which I was later much aided by Pere
Teilhard's writings, and by our conversations and correspondence.

The Phenomenon of Man is certainly the most important of
Pere Teilhard's published works. Of the rest, some, including
the essays in La Vision du Passe 1 , reveal earlier developments or
later elaborations of his general thought ; while others, like
L' Apparition de f 'Homme, are rather more technical.

Pere Teilhard starts from the position that mankind in its
totality is a phenomenon to be described and analysed like
any other phenomenon : it and all its manifestations, including
human history and human values, are proper objects for scientific
study.

His second and perhaps most fundamental point is the
absolute necessity of adopting an evolutionary point of view.
Though for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think
of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of
fact never static : they are always processes or parts of processes.

ia

INTRODUCTION

The different branches of science combine to demonstrate that
the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic pro-
cess, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence
and organisation, which can properly be called a genesis or an
evolution. For this reason, he uses words like noogenesis, to mean
the gradual evolution of mind or mental properties, and repeatedly
stresses that we should no longer speak of a cosmology but of a
cosmogenesis. Similarly, he likes to use a pregnant term like
hominisation to denote the process by which the original proto-
human stock became (and is still becoming) more truly human,
the process by which potential man realised more and more of his
possibilities. Indeed, he extends this evolutionary terminology by
employing terms like ultra-hominisation to denote the deducible
future stage of the process in which man will have so far tran-
scended himself as to demand some new appellation.

With this approach he is righdy and indeed inevitably driven
to the conclusion that, since evolutionary phenomena (of course
including the phenomenon known as man) are processes, they
can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or
mainly in terms of their origins : they must be defined by their
direction, their inherent possibilities (including of course also
their limitations), and their deducible future trends. He quotes
with approval Nietzsche's view that man is unfinished and must
be surpassed or completed ; and proceeds to deduce the steps
needed for his completion.

Pere Teilhard was keenly aware of the importance of vivid
and arresting terminology. Thus in 1925 he coined the term
noosphere to denote the sphere of mind, as opposed to, or rather
superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life, and acting as a
transforming agency promoting hominisation (or as I would
put it, progressive psychosocial evolution). He may perhaps
be criticised for not defining the term more explicidy. By
noosphere did he intend simply the total pattern of thinking
organisms (i.e. human beings) and their activity, including the
patterns of their interrelations : or did he intend the special
environment of man, the systems of organised thought and its

13

INTRODUCTION

products in which men move and have their being, as fish swim
and reproduce in rivers and the sea ?* Perhaps it might have
been better to restrict noosphere to the first-named sense, and to
use something like noosystem for the second. But certainly
noosphere is a valuable and thought-provoking word.

He usually uses convergence to denote the tendency of mankind,
during its evolution, to superpose centripetal on centrifugal
trends, so as to prevent centrifugal differentiation from leading
to fragmentation, and eventually to incorporate the results of
differentiation in an organised and unified pattern. Human con-
vergence was first manifested on the genetic or biological level :
after Homo sapiens began to differentiate into distinct races (or
subspecies, in more scientific terminology) migration and inter-
marriage prevented, the pioneers from going further, and led to
increasing interbreeding between all human variants. As a result,
man is the only successful type which has remained as a single
interbreeding group or species, and has not radiated out into a
number of biologically separated assemblages (like the birds, with
about 8,500 species, or the insects with over half a million).

Cultural differentiation set in later, producing a number of
psychosocial units with different cultures. However, these ' inter-
thinking groups ', as one writer has called them, are never so
sharply separated as are biological species ; and with time, the
process known to anthropologists as cultural diffusion, facilitated
by migration and improved communications, led to an accelerat-
ing counter-process of cultural convergence, and so towards the
union of the whole human species into a single mterthinking
group based on a single self-developing framework of thought
(or noosystem).

In parenthesis, Pere Teilhard showed himself aware of the

1 In Le Phtnombie Hunuun (p. 201) be refers to the noosphere as a new layer
or membrane on the earth's surface, a ' thinking layer ' superposed on the living
layer of the biosphere and the lifeless layer of inorganic material, the lithasphere.
But in his earner formulation of 1925, in La Vision in Passi (p. 92), he calls it
' une sphere de la reflexion, de I 'invention conscicnte, de l'union sentie des
imes'.

14

INTRODUCTION

danger that this tendency might destroy the valuable results o
cultural diversification, and lead to drab uniformity instead o 1
to a rich and potent pattern of variety-in-unity. Howevei.
perhaps because he was (rightly) so deeply concerned with
establishing a global unification of human awareness as a necessary
prerequisite for any real future progress of mankind, and perhap:
also because he was by nature and inclination more interestea
in rational and scientific thought than in the arts, he did not
discuss the evolutionary value of cultural variety in any detail,
but contented himself by maintaining that East and West are
culturally complementary, and that both are needed for the
further synthesis and unification of world thought.

Before passing to the full implications of human convergence,
I must deal with Pere Teilhard's valuable but rather difficult
concept of complexijication. This concept includes, as I under-
stand it, the genesis of increasingly elaborate organisation during
cosmogenesis, as manifested in the passage from subatomic units
to atoms, from atoms to inorganic and later to organic mole-
cules, thence to the first subcellular living units or self-replicating
assemblages of molecules, and then to cells, to multicellular
individuals, to cephalised metazoa with brains, to primitive man,
and now to civilised societies.

But it involves something more. He speaks of complexi-
fication as an all-pervading tendency, involving the universe in
all its parts in an enroulement organique sur soi-meme, or by an
alternative metaphor, as a reploiement sur soi-meme. He thus
envisages the world-stuff as being ' rolled up ' or folded in '
upon itself, both locally and in its entirety, and adds that the pro-
cess is accompanied by an increase of energetic ' tension ' in
the resultant ' corpuscular ' organisations, or individualised con-
structions of increased organisational complexity. For want of a
better English phrase, 1 shall use convergent integration to define
the operation of this process of self-complexification.

Pere Teilhard also maintains that complexification by con-
vergent integration leads to the intensification of mental subjective
activity — in other words to the evolution of progressively more

15

INTRODUCTION

conscious mind. Thus he states that full consciousness (as seen
in man) is to be defined as ' the specific effect of organised
complexity '. But, he continues, comparative study makes it
clear that higher animals have minds of a sort, and evolutionary
fact and logic demand that minds should have evolved gradually
as well as bodies and that accordingly mind-like (or ' mentoid ',
to employ a barbarous word that I am driven to coin because
of its usefulness) properties must be present throughout the
universe. Thus, in any case, we must infer the presence of
potential mind in all material systems, by backward extra-
polation from the human phase to the biological, and from the
biological to the inorganic. And according to Pere Teilhard,
we must envisage the intensification of mind, the raising of
mental potential, as being the necessary consequence of com-
plexification, operating by the convergent integration of increas-
ingly complex units of organisation.

The sweep of his thought goes even further. He seeks to link
the evolution of mind with the concept of energy. If I under-
stand him aright, he envisages two forms of energy, or perhaps
two modes in which it is manifested — energy in the physicists'
sense, measurable or calculable by physical methods, and ' psychic
energy ' which increases with the complexity of organised
units. 1 This view admittedly involves speculation of great intel-
lectual boldness, but the speculation is extrapolated from a
massive array of fact, and is disciplined by logic. It is, if you
like, visionary : but it is the product of a comprehensive and
coherent vision.

It might have been better to say that complexity of a sort
is a necessary prerequisite for mental evolution rather than its
cause. Some biologists, indeed, would claim that mind is
generated solely by the complexification of certain types of
organisation, namely brains. However, such logic appears to
me narrow. The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even

1 See, e.g., C. Cuenot, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paris, 1958, p. 430. We
certainly need some new terms in this field: perhaps neurergy and psychergy
would serve.

16

INTRODUCTION

though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation. Indeed an
isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense, as meaningless as
an isolated human individual. I would prefer to say that mind
is generated by or in complex organisations of living matter,
capable of receiving information of many qualities or modalities
about events both in the outer world and in itself, of synthesising
and processing that information in various organised forms, and
of utilising it to direct present and future action — in other words,
by higher animals with their sense-organs, nerves, brains, and
muscles. Perhaps, indeed, organisations of such complexity can
only arise in evolution when their construction enables them to
incorporate and interiorise varied external information : cer-
tainly no non-living, non-sentient organisation has reached
anything like this degree of elaboration.

In human or psychosocial evolution, convergence has cer-
tainly led to increased complexity. In Pere Teilhard's view, the
increase of human numbers combined with the improvement
of human communications has fused all the parts of the noosphere
together, has increased the tension within it, and has caused it
to become ' infolded ' upon itself, and therefore more highly
organised. In the process of convergence and coalescence, what
we may metaphorically describe as the psychosocial temperature
rises. Mankind as a whole will accordingly achieve more intense,
more complex, and more integrated mental activity, which can
guide the human species up the path of progress to higher levels
of hominisation.

Pere Teilhard was a strong visualiser. He saw with his
mind's eye that ' the banal fact of the earth's roundness ' — the
sphericity of man's environment — was bound to cause this
intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environ-
ment, man's thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would
simply diffuse outwards : it would extend over a greater area,
but would remain thinly spread. But when it is confined to
spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter
idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought, a noetic
system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary

17

INTRODUCTION

machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy.
When I read his discussion of the subject, I visualised this selective
web of living thought as the bounding structure of evolving
man, marking him off from the rest of the universe and yet
facilitating exchange with it : playing the same sort of role in
delimiting the human unit of evolution and yet encouraging the
complexification of its contents, as does the cell-membrane for
the animal cell.

Years later, when at the University of California in 1952,
this same vivid imagination led Pere Teilhard to draw a parallel
between the cyclotron generating immense intensities of physical
energy in the inwardly accelerating spiral orbits of its fields of
force, and the entire noosphere with its fields of thought curved
round upon themselves to generate new levels of ' psychical
energy '- 1 How his imagination would have kindled at the sight
of the circular torus of Zeta, within whose bounding curves
are generated the highest physical energies ever produced by
man !

Pere Teilhard, extrapolating from the past into the future,
envisaged the process of human convergence as tending to a
final state, 1 which he called ' point Omega ', as opposed to the
Alpha of elementary material particles and their energies. If I
understand him aright, he considers that two factors are co-operat-
ing to promote this further complexification of die noosphere.
One is the increase of knowledge about the universe at large,
from the galaxies and stars to human societies and individuals.
The other is the increase of psychosocial pressure on the surface
of our planet. The result of the one is that the noosphere incor-
porates ever more facts of the cosmos, including the facts of its
general direction and its trends in time, so as to become more

1 En regardant un cyclotron : in Rechcrches et dibats, Paris, April 1953, p.123.

2 Presumably, in designating this state as Omega, he believed that it was a
truly final condition. It might have been better to think of it merely as a novel
state or mode of organization, beyond which the human imagination cannot
at present pierce, though perhaps the strange facts of extra-sensory perception
unearthed by the infant science of parapsychology may give us a clue to a
possible more ultimate state.

18

INTRODUCTION

truly a microcosm, which (like all incorporated knowledge) is
both a mirror and a directive agency. The result of the other
is the increased unification and the increased intensity of the
system of human thought. The combined result, according
to Pere Teilhard, will be the attainment of point Omega,
where the noosphere will be intensely unified and will have
achieved a ' hyperpersonal ' organisation.

Here his thought is not fully clear to me. Sometimes he seems
to equate this future hyperpersonal psychosocial organisation
with an emergent Divinity : at one place, for instance, he speaks
of the trend as a Christogenesis ; and elsewhere he appears not to
be guarding himself sufBciendy against the dangers of personi-
fying the non-personal elements of reality. Sometimes, too, he
seems to envisage as desirable the merging of individual human
variety in this new unity. Though many scientists may, as I do,
find it impossible to follow him all the way in his gallant attempt
to reconcile the supernatural elements in Christianity with the
facts and implications of evolution, this in no way detracts from
the positive value of his naturalistic general approach.

In any case the concept of a hyperpersonal mode of organisa-
tion sprang from Pere Teilhard's conviction of the supreme
importance of personality. A developed human being, as he
rightly pointed out, is not merely a more highly individualised
individual. He has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to
a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some
degree of conscious integration — integration of the self with the
outer world of men and nature, integration of the separate
elements of the self with each other. He is a person, an organism
which has transcended individuality in personality. This attain-
ment of personality was an essential element in man's past and
present evolutionary success : accordingly its fuller achievement
must be an essential aim for his evolutionary future.

This belief in the pre-eminent importance of the personality
in the scheme of things was for him a matter of faith, bu of
faith supported by rational inquiry and scientific knowledge It
prevented him frorh diluting his concept of the divine principle

19

INTRODUCTION

inherent in reality, in a vague and meaningless pantheism, just
as his apprehension of the entire process of reality as a system
of interrelations, and of mankind as actively participating in
that process, saved him from losing his way in the deserts of
individualism and existentialism.

He realised that the appearance of human personality was
the culmination of two major evolutionary trends — the trend
towards more extreme individuation, and that towards more
extensive interrelation and co-operation : persons are individuals
who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious
participation.

His understanding of the method by which organisms become
first individualised and then personalised gave him a number of
valuable insights. Basically, the process depends on cephalisation
— the differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region
of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense-
organs providing information about the outer world and also
the main organ of co-ordination or brain.

With his genius for fruitful analogy, he points out that the
process of evolution on earth is itself now in the process of
becoming cephalised. Before the appearance of man, life con-
sisted of a vast array of separate branches, linked only by an
unorganised pattern of ecological interaction. The incipient
development of mankind into a single psychosocial unit, with
a single noosystem or common pool of thought, is providing
the evolutionary process with the rudiments of a head. It remains
for our descendants to organise this global noosystem more
adequately, so as to enable mankind to understand the process
of evolution on earth more fully and to direct it more adequately.

I had independently expressed something of the same sort,
by saying that in modern scientific man, evolution was at last
becoming conscious of itself — a phrase which I found delighted
Pere Teilhard. His formulation, however, is more profound
and more seminal : it implies that we should consider inter-
thinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny
it is to realise new possibilities for evolving life on this planet.

20

INTRODUCTION

Accordingly, we should endeavour to equip it with the mech-
anisms necessary for the proper fulfilment of its task — the
psychosocial equivalents of sense-organs, effector organs, and a
co-ordinating central nervous system with dominant brain ; and
our aim should be the gradual personalisation of the human
unit of evolution — its conversion, on the new level of co-operative
interthinking, into the equivalent of a person.

Once he had grasped and faced the fact of man as an evolu-
tionary phenomenon, the way was open towards a new and
comprehensive system of thought. It remained to draw the
fullest conclusions from this central concept of man as the
spearhead of evolution on earth, and to follow out the implica-
tions of this approach in as many fields as possible. The biologist
may perhaps consider that in The Phenomenon of Man he paid
insufficient attention to genetics and the possibilities and limita-
tions of natural selection, 1 the theologian that his treatment of
the problems of sin and suffering was inadequate or at least
unorthodox, the social scientist that he failed to take sufficient
account of the facts of political and social history. But he saw
that what was needed at the moment was a broad sweep and a
comprehensive treatment. This was what he essayed in The
Phenomenon of Man. In my view he achieved a remarkable success,
and opened up vast territories of thought to further exploration
and detailed mapping.

The facts of Pere Teilhard's life help to illuminate the develop-
ment of his thought. His father was a small landowner in
Auvergne, a gentleman farmer who was also an archivist, with
a taste for natural history. Pierre was bom in 1881, the fourth
in a family of eleven. At the age of ten he went as a boarder
to a Jesuit College where, besides doing well in all prescribed
subjects of study, he became devoted to field geology and
mineralogy. When eighteen years old, he decided to become a
Jesuit, and entered their order. At the age of twenty-four, after

1 Though in his Institute for Human Studies he envisaged a section of
Eugenics.

21

INTRODUCTION

an interlude in Jersey mainly studying philosophy, he was sent
to teach physics and chemistry in a Jesuit College at Cairo. In
the course of his three years in Egypt, and a further four studying
theology in Sussex, he acquired real competence in geology and
palaeontology ; and before being ordained priest in 1912, a reading
of Bergson's Evolution Cre'atrice had helped to inspire in him a
profound interest in the general facts and theories of evolution.
Returning to Paris, he pursued his geological studies and started
working under Marcellin Boule, the leading prehistorian and
archaeologist of France, in his Institute of Human Palaeontology
at the Museum of Natural History. It was here that he met his
lifelong friend and colleague in the study of prehistory, the Abbe -
Breuil, and that his interests were first directed to the subject on
which his life's work was centred — the evolution of man. In
19 1 3 he visited the site where the famous (and now notorious)
Piltdown skull had recently been unearthed, in company with its
discoverer Dr. Dawson and the leading English palaeontologist
Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. This was his first introduction
to the excitements of palaeontological discovery and scientific
controversy.

During the first World War he served as a stretcher-bearer,
receiving the Military Medal and the Legion of Honour, and
learnt a great deal about his fellow men and about his own
nature. The war strengthened his sense of religious vocation,
and in 1918 he made a triple vow of poverty, chastity and
obedience.

By 1919 the major goals of his life were clearly indicated.
Professionally, he had decided to embark on a geological career,
with special emphasis on palaeontology. As a thinker, he had
reached a point where the entire phenomenal universe, including
man, was revealed as a process of evolution, and he found himself
impelled to build up a generalised theory or philosophy of
evolutionary process which would take account of human history
and human personality as well as of biology, and from which
one could draw conclusions as to the future evolution of man
on earth. And as a dedicated Christian priest, he felt it imperative

22

INTRODUCTION

to try to reconcile Christian theology with this evolutionary
philosophy, to relate the facts of religious experience to those of
natural science.

Returning to the Sorbonne, he took his Doctorate in 1922.
He had already become Professor of Geology at the Catholic
Institute of Paris, where his lectures attracted great attention
among the students (three of whom are now teaching in the
University of Paris). In 1923, however, he went to China for
a year on behalf of the Museum, on a palaeontological mission
directed by another Jesuit, Pere Licent. His Lettres de Voyage
reveal the impression made on him by the voyage through the
tropics, and by his first experience of geological research in the
desert remoteness of Mongolia and north-western China. This
expedition inspired La Messe sur k Monde, a remarkable and truly
poetical essay which was at one and the same time mystical and
realistic, religious and philosophical.

A shock awaited him after liis return to France. Some of the
ideas which he had expressed in his lectures about original sin
and its relation to evolution, were regarded as unorthodox by
his religious superiors, and he was forbidden to continue teaching.
In 1926 he returned to work with Pere Licent in China, where
he was destined to stay, with brief returns to France and excur-
sions to the United States, to Abyssinia, India, Burma and Java,
for twenty years. Here, as scientific adviser to the Geological
Survey of China, centred first at Tientsin and later at Peking,
he met and worked with outstanding palaeontologists of many
nations, and took part in a number of expeditions, including the
Citroen Croisiere Jaune under Haardt, and Davidson Black's
expedition which unearthed the skull of Peking man.

In 1938 he was appointed Director of the Laboratory of
Advanced Studies in Geology and Palaeontology in Paris, but
the outbreak of war prevented his return to France. His enforced
isolation in China during the six war years, painful and depressing
though it often was, undoubtedly helped his inner spiritual
development (as the isolation of imprisonment helped to mature
the thought and character of Nehru and many other Indians).

23

INTRODUCTION

It encouraged ample reading and reflection, and stimulated the
full elaboration of his thought.

It was a nice stroke of irony that the action of Pere Teilhard's
religious superiors in barring him from teaching in France
because of his ideas on human evolution, should have led him to
China and brought him into intimate association with one of
the most important discoveries in that field, and driven him to
enlarge and consolidate his ' dangerous thoughts '.

During the whole of this period he was writing essays and
books on various aspects and implications of evolution, culminat-
ing in 1938 in the manuscript of Le Phenomene Humain. But
he never succeeded in obtaining permission to publish any of
his controversial or major works. This caused him much distress,
for he was conscious of a prophetic mission : but he faithfully
observed his vow of obedience. Professionally too he was
extremely active throughout this period. He contributed a great
deal to our knowledge of palaeolithic cultures in China and
neighbouring areas, and to the general understanding of the
geology of the Far East. This preoccupation with large-scale
geology led him to take an interest in the geological development
of the world's continents : each continent, he considered, had
made its own special contribution to biological evolution. He
also did important palaeontological work on the evolution of
various mammalian groups.

The wide range of his vision made him impatient of over-
specialisation, and of the timidity which refuses to pass from
detailed study to broad syndiesis. With his conception of man-
kind as at the same time an unfinished product of past evolution
and an agency of distinctive evolution to come, he was par-
ticularly impatient of what he felt as the narrowness of those
anthropologists who limited themselves to a study of physical
structure and the details of primitive social life. He wanted to
deal with the entire human phenomenon, as a transcendence of
biological by psychosocial evolution. And he had considerable
success in redirecting along these lines die institutions with which
he was connected.

24

INTRODUCTION

Back in France in 1946, Pere Teilhard plunged eagerly into
European intellectual life, but in 1947 he had a serious heart
attack, and was compelled to spend several months convalescing
in the country. On his return to Paris, he was enjoined by his
superiors not to write any more on philosophical subjects : and
in 1948 he was forbidden to put forward his candidature for a
Professorship in the College de France in succession to the Abbe"
Breuil, though it was known that this, the highest academic
position to which he could aspire, was open to him. But perhaps
the heaviest blow awaited him in 1950, when his application for
permission to publish Le Groupe Zoologique Humain (a recasting
of Le Phinomene Humain) was refused in Rome. By way of
compensation he was awarded the signal honour of being elected
Membre de 1'Institut, as well as having previously become a
Corresponding Member of the Acadimie des Sciences, an officer
of the Legion d'Homwur, and a director of research in the Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Already in 1948 he had been invited to visit the U.S.A.,
where he made his fust contacts with the Wenner-Gren Founda-
tion (or Viking Foundation as it was then called), in whose
friendly shelter he spent the last four years of his life. The
Wermer-Gren Foundation also sponsored his two visits to South
Africa, where he was able to study at first hand the remarkable
discoveries of Broom and Dart concerning Australopithecus,
that near-ancestor of man, and to lay down a plan for the future
co-ordination of palaeontological and archaeological work in this
area, so important as a centre of hominid evolution.

His position in France became increasingly difficult, and in
195 1 he moved his headquarters to New York. Here, at the
Wenner-Gren Foundation, he played an important role in
framing anthropological policy, and made valuable contribu-
tions to the international symposia which it organised. And
here, in 1954, I had the privilege of working with him in one
of the remarkable discussion groups set up as part of the Columbia
Bicentennial celebrations. Just before this, he had returned to
France for a brief but stimulating month of discussion.

25

INTRODUCTION

Throughout this period, he had been actively developing his
ideas, and had written his spiritual autobiography, Le Caeur de
la Mature, the semi-technical Le Croupe Zoologique Humaitt,
and various technical and general articles later included in the
collections entitled La Vision du Passe and L' Apparition de
FHomme.

He was prevailed on to leave his manuscripts to a friend.
They therefore could be published after his death, since per-
mission to publish is only required for the work of a living
writer. The prospect of eventual publication must have been
a great solace to him, for he certainly regarded his general and
philosophical writings as the keystone of his life's work, and
felt it his supreme duty to proclaim the fruits of his labour.

It was my privilege to have been a friend and correspondent
of Pere Teilhard for nearly ten years ; and it is my privilege
now to introduce this, his most notable work, to English-
speaking readers.

His influence on the world's thinking is bound to be im-
portant. Through his combination of wide scientific knowledge
with deep religious feeling and a rigorous sense of values, he has
forced theologians to view their ideas in the new perspective of
evolution, and scientists to see the spiritual implications of their
knowledge. He has both clarified and unified our vision of
reality. In the light of that new comprehension, it is no longer
possible to maintain that science and religion must operate in
thought-tight compartments or concern separate sectors of life ;
they are both relevant to the whole of human existence. The
religiously-minded can no longer turn their backs upon the
natural world, or seek escape from its imperfections in a super-
natural world ; nor can the materialistically-minded deny
importance to spiritual experience and religious feeling.

Like him, we must face the phenomena. If we face them
resolutely, and avail ourselves of the help which his intellectual
and spiritual travail has provided, wc shall find a more assured
basis for our thought and a more certain direction for our evolu-

26

INTRODUCTION

tionary advance. But, like him, we must not take refuge in
abstractions of generalities. He always took account of the
specific realities of man's present situation, though set against
the more general realities of long-term evolution ; and he
always endeavoured to think concretely, in terms of actual
patterns of organisation — their development, their mode of
operation and their effects.

As a result, he has helped us to define more adequately both
our own nature, the general evolutionary process, and our place
and role in it. Thus clarified, the evolution of life becomes a
comprehensible phenomenon. It is an anti-cntropic process,
running counter to the second law of thermodynamics with its
degradation of energy and its tendency to uniformity. With the
aid of the sun's energy, biological evolution marches uphill, pro-
ducing increased variety and higher degrees of organisation.

It also produces more varied, more intense and more highly
organised mental activity or awareness. During evolution,
awareness (or if you prefer, the mental properties of living matter)
becomes increasingly important to organisms, until in mankind
it becomes the most important characteristic of life, and gives the
human type its dominant position.

After this critical point has been passed, evolution takes on
a new character : it becomes primarily a psychosocial process,
based on the cumulative transmission of experience and its
results, and working through an organised system of awareness,
a combined operation of knowing, feeling and willing. In man,
at least during the historical and proto-historical periods, evolution
has been characterised more by cultural than by genetic or
biological change.

On this new psychosocial level, the evolutionary process
leads to new types and higher degrees of organisation. On the
one hand there are new patterns of co-operation among indi-
viduals — co-operation for practical control, for enjoyment, for
education, and notably in the last few centuries, for obtaining
new knowledge ; and on the other there arc new patterns of
thought, new organisations of awareness and its products.

27

INTRODUCTION

As a result, new and often wholly unexpected possibilities
have been realised, the variety and degree of human fulfilment
has been increased. Pere Teilhard enables us to see which possi-
bilities are in the long run desirable. What is more, he has helped
to define the conditions of advance, the conditions which will
permit an increase of fulfilment and prevent an increase of
frustration. The conditions of advance are these : global unity
of mankind's noetic organisation or system of awareness, but a
high degree of variety within that unity ; love, with goodwill
and full co-operation ; personal integration and internal har-
mony ; and increasing knowledge.

Knowledge is basic. It is knowledge which enables us to
understand the world and ourselves, and to exercise some control
or guidance. It sets us in a fruitful and significant relation with
the enduring processes of the universe. And, by revealing the
possibilities of fulfilment that are still open, it provides an over-
riding incentive.

We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense
future, and can realise more and more of them on condition
that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to
me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man.

London, December 1Q5$

zi

Preface

If this book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a
work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theological essay, but
purely and simply as a scientific treatise. The title itself indicates
that. This book deals with man solely as a phenomenon ; but it
also deals with the whole phenomenon of man.

In the first place, it deals with man solely as a phenomenon.
The pages which follow do not attempt to give an explanation of
the world, but only an introduction to such an explanation. Put
quite simply, what I have tried to do is this ; I have chosen man
as the centre, and around him I have tried to establish a coherent
order between antecedents and consequents. I have not tried to
discover a system of ontological and causal relations between the
elements of the universe, but only an experimental law of re-
currence which would express their successive appearance in
time. Beyond these first purely scientific reflections, there is
obviously ample room for farther-reaching speculations of
the philosopher and the theologian. Of set purpose, I have at all
times carefully avoided venturing into that field of the essence of
being. At most I am confident that, on the plane of experience,
1 have identified with some accuracy the combined movement
towards unity, and have marked the places where philosophical and
religious thinkers, in pursuing the matter further, would be
entitled, for reasons of a higher order, to look for breaches
of continuity. 1

But this book also deals with the whole phenomenon of man.

Without contradicting what I have just said (however much it

may appear to do so) it is this aspect which might possibly make

my suggestions look like a philosophy. During the last fifty years

1 Sec, for example, the footnotes on pp. 160, i8<5, 298.

29

PREFACE

or so, the investigations of science have proved beyond alJ doubt
that there is no fact which exists in pure isolation, but that every
experience, however objective it may seem, inevitably becomes
enveloped in a complex of assumptions as soon as the scientist
attempts to express it in a formula. But while this aura of sub-
jective interpretation may remain imperceptible where the field
of observation is limited, it is bound to become practically
dominant as soon as the field of vision extends to the whole. Like
the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and
religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.
I say ' converge ' advisedly, but without merging, and without
ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles
and on different planes. Take any book about the universe written
by one of the great modern scientists, such as Poincare, Einstein or
Jeans, and you will see that it is impossible to attempt a general
scientific interpretation of the universe without giving the impres-
sion of trying to explain it through and through. But look a little
more closely and you will see that this ' hyperphysics ' is still not
a metaphysic.

In the course of every effort of this kind to give a scientific
description of the whole, it is natural that certain basic assumptions,
on which the whole further structure rests, should make their
influence felt to the fullest possible extent. In the specific instance
of the present Essay, I think it important to point out that two
basic assumptions go hand in hand to support and govern every
development of the theme. The first is the primacy accorded to the
psychic and to thought in the stuff of the universe, and the second
is the ' biological ' value attributed to the social fact around us.

The pre-eminent significance of man in nature, and the
organic nature of mankind ; these are two assumptions that one
may start by trying to reject, but without accepting them, I do
not see how it is possible to give a full and coherent account of
the phenomenon of man.

Paris, March 1947

30

Foreword

SEEING

This work may be summed up as an attempt to see and to make
others see what happens to man, and what conclusions are forced
upon us, when he is placed fairly and squarely within the frame-
work of phenomenon and appearance.

Why should we want to see, and why in particular should we
single out man as our object ?

Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb—
if not ultimately, at least essentially. Fuller being is closer union :
such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us empha-
sise the point : union increases only through an increase in con-
sciousness, that is to say in vision. And that, doubtless, is why the
history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration
of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is
always something more to be seen. After all, do we not judge
the perfection of an animal, or the supremacy of a thinking being,
by the penetration and synthetic power of their gaze ? To try to
see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-
indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon
everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious
gift of existence. And this, in superior measure, is man's condition.

But if it is true that it is so vital and so blessed to know, let us
ask again why we are turning our attention particularly to man.
Has man not been adequately described already, and is he not a
tedious subject ? Is it not precisely one of the attractions of science
that it rests our eyes by turning them away from man ?

Man has a double title, as the twofold centre of the world, to
impose himself on our effort to sec, as the key to the universe.

3i

FOREWORD

Subjectively, first of all, we are inevitably the centre of
perspective of our own observation. In its early, naive stage,
science, perhaps inevitably, imagined that we could observe
phenomena in themselves, as they would take place in our
absence. Instinctively physicists and naturalists went to work as
though they could look down from a great height upon a world
which their consciousness could penetrate without being sub-
mitted to it or changing it. They are now beginning to realise
that even the most objective of their observations are steeped in
the conventions they adopted at the outset and by forms or
habits of thought developed in the course of the growth of
research ; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they
cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have
reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the
reflection of their own thought. And at die same time they
realise that as the result of their discoveries, they are caught body
and soul to the network of relationships they thought to cast
upon things from outside : in fact they are caught in their own
net. A geologist would use the words metamorphism and
endomorphism. Object and subject marry and mutually trans-
form each other in the act of knowledge ; and from now on
man willy-nilly fmds his own image stamped on all he looks at.
This is indeed a form of bondage, for which, however, a
unique and assured grandeur provides immediate compensation.
It is tiresome and even humbling for die observer to be thus
fettered, to be obliged to carry with him everywhere the centre
of the landscape he is crossing. But what happens when chance
directs his steps to a point of vantage (a cross-roads, or intersecting
valleys) from which, not only his vision, but things themselves
radiate? In that event the subjective viewpoint coincides with
the way things are distributed objectively, and perception reaches
its apogee. The landscape lights up and yields its secrets. He sees.
That seems to be the privilege of man's knowledge.
It is not necessary to be a man to perceive surrounding things
and forces ' in the round '. All the animals have reached this point
as well as us. But it is peculiar to man to occupy a position in

32

FOREWORD

nature at which the convergent lines are not only visual but
structural. The following pages will do no more than verify and
analyse this phenomenon. By virtue of the quality and the bio-
logical properties of thought, we find ourselves situated at a
singular point, at a ganglion which commands the whole fraction
of the cosmos that is at present within reach of our experience.
Man, the centre of perspective, is at the same time the centre of
construction of the universe. And by expediency no less than by
necessity, all science must be referred back to him. If to see is
really to become more, if vision is really fuller being, then we
should look closely at man in order to increase our capacity to
live.

But to do this we must focus our eyes correctly.

From the dawn of his existence, man has been held up as a
spectacle to himself. Indeed for tens of centuries he has looked at
nothing but himself. Yet he has only just begun to take a scientific
view of his own significance in the physical world. There is no
need to be surprised at this slow awakening. It often happens
that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive.
The child has to learn to separate out the images which assail
the newly-opened retina. For man to discover man and take his
measure, a whole series of ' senses ' have been necessary, whose
gradual acquisition, as we shall show, covers and punctuates the
whole history of the struggles of the mind :

A sense of spatial immensity, in greatness and smallness, dis-
articulating and spacing out, within a sphere of indefinite radius,
the orbits of the objects which press round us ;

A sense of depth, pushing back laboriously through endless
series and measureless distances of time, which a sort of sluggish-
ness of mind tends continually to condense for us in a thin layer
of the past ;

A sense of number, discovering and grasping unflinchingly
the bewildering multitude of material or living elements involved
in the slightest change in the universe ;

A sense of proportion, realising as best we can the difference
of physical scale which separates, both in rhythm and dimension,

33

FOREWORD

the atom from the nebula, the infinitesimal from the immense ;

A sense of quality, or of novelty, enabling us to distinguish in
nature certain absolute stages of perfection and growth, without
upsetting the physical unity of the world ;

A sense of movement, capable of perceiving the irresistible
developments hidden in extreme slowness — extreme agitation
concealed beneath a veil of immobility — the entirely new in-
sinuating itself into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the
same things ;

A sense, lastly, of the organic, discovering physical links and
structural unity under the superficial juxtaposition of successions
and collectivities.

Without these qualities to illuminate our vision, man will
remain indefinitely for us — whatever is done to make us see —
what he still represents to so many minds : an erratic object in a
disjointed world. Conversely, we have only to rid our vision of
the threefold illusion of smallness, plurality and immobility, for
man effordessly to take the central position we prophesied — the
momentary summit of an anthropogenesis which is itself the
crown of a cosmogencsis.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind,
neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life un-
related to the universe.

Thence stems the basic plan of this work : Pre-Life : Life :
Thought — three events sketching in the past and determining for
the future (Survival) a single and continuing trajectory, the curve
of the phenomenon of man.

The phenomenon of man — I stress this.

This phrase is not chosen at random, but for three reasons.

First to assert that man, in nature, is a genuine fact falling (at
least partially) within the scope of the requirements and methods
of science ;

Secondly, to make plain that of all the facts offered to our
knowledge, none is more extraordinary or more illuminating ;

Thirdly, to stress the special character of the Essay I am pre-
senting.

34

FOREWORD

I repeat that my only aim, and my only vantage-ground in
these pages, is to try to see ; that is to say, to try to develop a
homogeneous and coherent perspective of our general extended
experience of man. A whole which unfolds.

So please do not expect a final explanation of things here, nor
a metaphysical system. Neither do I want any misunderstanding
about the degree of reality which I accord to the different parts of
the film I am projecting. When 1 try to picture the world before
the dawn of life, or life in the Palaeozoic era, I do not forget that
there would be a cosmic contradiction in imagining a man as
spectator of those phases which ran their course before the
appearance of thought on earth. I do not pretend to describe
them as they really were, but rather as we must picture them to
ourselves so that the world may be true for us at this moment.
What I depict is not the past in itself, but as it must appear to an
observer standing on the advanced peak where evolution has
placed us. It is a safe and modest method and yet, as we shall see,
it suffices, through symmetry, to bring out ahead of us surprising
visions of the future.

Even reduced to these humble proportions, the views I am
attempting to put forward here arc, of course, largely tentative
and personal. Yet inasmuch as they are based on arduous investi-
gation and sustained reflection, they give an idea, by means of
one example, of the way in which the problem of man presents
itself in science today.

When studied narrowly in himself by anthropologists or
jurists, man is a tiny, even a shrinking, creature. His over-
pronounced individuality conceals from our eyes the whole to
which he belongs ; as we look at him our minds incline to break
nature up into pieces and to forget both its deep inter-relations
and its measureless horizons : we incline to all that is bad in
anthropocentrism. And it is this that still leads scientists to refuse
to consider man as an object of scientific scrutiny except through
his body.

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the
universe — even a positivist one — remains unsatisfying unless it

35

FOREWORD

covers the interior as well as the exterior of things ; mind as well
as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve
the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the
world.

I hope I shall persuade the reader that such an attempt is
possible, and that the preservation of courage and the joy of
action in those of us who wish, and know how, to plumb the
depths of things, depend on it.

In fact I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for
a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he
discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes,
and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised
in him.

In such a vision man is seen not as a static centre of the world
— as he for long believed himself to be — but as the axis and
leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer.

BOOK ONE

BEFORE LIFE CAME

36

CHAPTER ONE

THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

To push anything back into the past is equivalent to reducing
it to its simplest elements. Traced as far as possible in the direction
of their origins, the last fibres of the human aggregate are lost to
view and are merged in our eyes with the very stuff of the
universe.

As for the stuff of the universe — the ultimate residue of the
ever more advanced analyses of science — I have not cultivated
that direct and familiar contact with it which would enable me to
do it justice, that contact which comes from experiment and not
from reading and makes all the difference. Besides, I know the
danger of trying to construct a lasting edifice with hypotheses
which are only expected to last for a day, even in the minds of
those who originate them.

To a considerable extent, the representation of the atom
accepted at this moment is nothing more than a simple means,
graphic even while subject to revision, enabling the scientist to
put together and to show the non-contradiction of the ever more
various ' effects ' manifested by matter — many of which, more-
over, have still no recognisable prolongation in man.

As I am a naturalist rather than a physicist, obviously I shall
avoid dealing at length with or placing undue reliance upon these
complicated and fragile edifices.

On the other hand, among the variety of overlapping theories,
a certain number of characteristics emerge which are inevitable in
any suggested explanation of the universe. It is of these ' imposed '
factors that it is not unbecoming for a naturalist to speak when
engaged on a general study of the phenomenon of man. In fact,

39

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

inasmuch as they express the conditions belonging to all natural
change, even biological, he is bound to take them as his point of
departure.

i. ELEMENTAL MATTER

Observed from this special angle, and considered at the outset in
its elemental state (by which I mean at any moment, at any
point, and in any volume), the stuff of tangible things reveals
itself with increasing insistence as radically particulate yet essen-
tially related, and lastly, prodigiously active.

Plurality, unity, energy : the three faces of matter.

A.

Plurality

The profoundly ' atomic ' l character of the universe is visible in
everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts
of the living, and the multitude of stars ; even in the ashes of the
dead. Man has needed neither microscope nor electronic analysis
in order to suspect that he lives surrounded by and resting on dust.
But to count the grains and describe them, all the patient craft of
modern science was necessary. The atoms of Epicurus were mert
and indivisible. And the infinitesimal worlds of Pascal could still
possess their animalcules. Today we have gone far beyond such
instinctive or inspired guesswork bodi in certainty and precision.
The scaling down is unlimited. Like die tiny diatom shells whose
markings, however magnified, change almost indefinitely into
new patterns, so each particle of matter, ever smaller and smaller,
under the physicist's analysis tends to reduce itself into some-
thing yet more finely granulated. And at each new step in
this progressive approach to the infinitely small the whole
configuration of the world is for a moment blurred and then
renewed.
1 [Atomkitf.]

40

THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

When we probe beyond a certain degree of depth and dilution,
the familiar properties of our bodies— light, colour, warmth,
impenetrability, etc. — lose their meaning.

Indeed our sensory experience turns out to be a floating con-
densation on a swarm of the undefinable. Bewildering in its
multiplicity and its minuteness, the substratum of the tangible
universe is in an unending state of disintegration as it goes down-
ward.

B. Unity

On the other hand the more we split and pulverise matter
artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

In its most imperfect form, but the simplest to imagine, this
unity reveals itself in the astonishing similarity of the elements
met with. Molecules, atoms, electrons— whatever the name,
whatever the scale — these minute units (at any rate when viewed
from our distance) manifest a perfect identity of mass and of
behaviour. In their dimensions and actions they seem astonish-
ingly calibrated — and monotonous. It is almost as if all that
surface play which charms our lives tends to disappear at deeper
levels. It is almost as if the stuff of which all stuff is made were
reducible in the end to some simple and unique kind of substance.

Thus the unity of homogeneity. To the cosmic corpuscles we
should find it natural to attribute an individual radius of action
as limited as their dimensions. We find, on the contrary, that
each of them can only be defined by virtue of its influence on all
around it. Whatever space we suppose it to be in, each cosmic
element radiates in it and entirely fills it. However narrowly the
' heart ' of an atom may be circumscribed, its realm is co-extensive,
at least potentially, with that of every other atom. This strange
property we will come across again, even in the human molecule.

We add : collective unity. The innumerable foci which share
a given volume of matter are not therefore independent of each
other. Something holds them together. Par from behaving as a

41

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

mere inert receptacle, the space filled by their multitude operates
upon it like an active centre of direction and transmission in which
their plurality is organised. We do not get what we call matter
as a result of the simple aggregation and juxtaposition of atoms.
For that, a mysterious identity must absorb and cement them, an
influence at which our mind rebels in bewilderment at first but
which in the end it must perforce accept.

We mean the sphere above the centres and enveloping them.

Throughout these pages, in each new phase of anthropo-
genesis, we shall find ourselves faced by the unimaginable reality
of collective bonds, and we shall have to struggle with them
without ceasing until we succeed in recognising and defining their
true nature. Here in the beginning it is sufficient to include them
all under the empirical name given by science to their common
initial principle, namely energy.

c. Energy

Under this name, which conveys the experience of effort with
which we arc familiar in ourselves, physics has introduced die
precise formulation of a capacity for action or, more exactly, for
interaction. Energy is the measure of that which passes from one
atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying
power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become
enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression
of structure.

From the aspect of energy, renewed by radio-active pheno-
mena, material corpuscles may now be treated as transient
reservoirs of concentrated power. Though never found in a state
of purity, but always more or less granulated (even in light)
energy nowadays represents for science the most primitive form
of universal stuff. Hence we find our minds instinctively tending
to represent energy as a kind of homogeneous, primordial flux
in which all that has shape in the world is but a series of fleeting
' vortices '. From this point of view, the universe would find its

42

THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

stability and final unity at the end of its decomposition. It would be
held together from below.

Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of
physics. But let us not become bound and fettered to the per-
spective of final equilibrium that they seem to suggest. A more
complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us,
little by little, to turn it upside down ; in other words, to discover
that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of
complexity, from above.

2. TOTAL MATTER

Up to now we have been looking at matter as such, that is to say
according to its qualities and in any given volume — as though it
were permissible for us to break off a fragment and study this
sample apart from the rest. It is time to point out that this
procedure is merely an intellectual dodge. Considered in its
physical, concrete reality, the stuff of the universe cannot divide
itself but, as a kind of gigantic ' atom ', it forms in its totality
(apart from thought on which it is centred and concentrated at
the other end) the only real indivisible. The history of conscious-
ness and its place in the world remain incomprehensible to anyone
who has not seen first of all that the cosmos in which man finds
himself caught up constitutes, by reason of the unimpeachable
wholeness of its whole, a system, a Mum and a quantum : a system
by its plurality, a totum by its unity, a quantum by its energy ;
all three within a boundless contour.
Let us try to make this clear.

A. The System

The existence of ' system ' in the world is at once obvious to every
observer of nature, no matter whom.

The arrangement of the parts of the universe has always been

43

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

a source of amazement to men. But this disposition proves itself
more and more astonishing as, every day, our science is able to
make a more precise and penetrating study of the facts. The
farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of
increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by
the interdependence of its parts. Each element of the cosmos is
positively woven from all the others : from beneath itself by the
mysterious phenomenon of ' composition ', which makes it
subsistent through the apex of an organised whole; and from
above through the influence of unities of a higher order which
incorporate and dominate it for their own ends.

It is impossible to cut into this network, to isolate a portion
without it becoming frayed and unravelled at all its edges.

All around us, as far as the eye can see, the universe holds
together, and only one way of considering it is really possible,
that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece.

b. The Totum

Now, if we consider this whole more attentively, we quickly see
that it is something quite other than a mere entanglement of
articulated inter-connections. If one says fabric or network, one
thinks of a homogeneous plexus of similar units which it may
indeed be impossible to section, but of which it is sufficient to
have recognised the basic unit and to have defined the law to be
able to understand the whole by repetition : a crystal or arabesque
whose laws are valid for whatever space it fills, but which is
wholly contained in a single mesh.

Between such a structure and the structure of matter there is
nothing in common.

In its different orders of magnitude, matter never repeats its
different combinations. For expedience and simplicity we some-
times like to imagine the world as being a series of planetary
systems superimposed, the one on the other, and grading from
the infinitely small to the infinitely big : Pascal's two abysses

44

THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

once again. This is only an illusion. The envelopes composing
matter are thoroughly heterogeneous the one with regard to the
other. First we have a vague circle of electrons and other inferior
units ; then a better-defined circle of simple bodies in which the
elements are distributed as periodic functions of the atom of
hydrogen ; farther on another circle, of inexhaustible molecular
combinations ; and lastly, jumping or recoiling from the infini-
tesimal to the infinite, a circle of stars and galaxies. These multiple
zones of the cosmos envelop without imitating each other in such
a way that we cannot pass from one to another by a simple
change of coefficients. Here is no repetition of the same theme on
a different scale. The order and the design do not appear except
in the whole. The mesh of the universe is the universe itself.

Thus it is not enough merely to assert that matter forms a
block or whole.

The stuff of the universe, woven in a single piece according
to one and the same system, 1 but never repeating itself from one
point to another, represents a single figure. Structurally, it forms
a Whole.

c. The Quantum

Now, if the natural unity of concrete space indeed coincides
with the totality of space itself, we must try to re-define energy
with reference to space as a whole.

This leads us to two conclusions.

The first is that the radius of action proper to each cosmic
element must be prolonged in theory to the utmost limits of the
world itself. As we said above, since the atom is naturally
co-extensive with the whole of the space in which it is situated —
and since, on the other hand, we have just seen that a universal
space is the only space there is — we are bound to admit that this
immensity represents the sphere of action common to all atoms.
The volume of each of them is the volume of the universe. The
1 Which we shall call later on ' the Law of Consciousness and Complexity '.

45

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

atom is no longer the microscopic, closed world wc may have
imagined to ourselves. It is the infinitesimal centre of the world

itself.

Now, on the other hand, let us turn our attention to the
entirety of the infinitesimal centres which share the universal
sphere among themselves. Indefinite though their number may
be, they constitute in their multitude a group which has precise
effects. For the whole, because it exists, must express itself in a
global capacity for action of which we find the partial resultant in
each one of us. Thus we find ourselves led on to envisage and
conceive a dynamic standard of the world.

True the world lias apparently limitless contours. To use
varying metaphors: it behaves to our senses, either as a pro-
gressively attenuated environment which vanishes without a
limital surface in an infinitely decreasing gradation, or as a
curved and closed space within which all the lines of our experi-
ence turn back upon themselves, in which case matter only
appears boundless to us because we cannot emerge from it.

This is no reason for refusing it a quantum of energy, which
the physicists, incidentally, already think they are in a position to
measure.

But this quantum only takes on its full significance when we
try to define it with regard to a concrete natural movement—
that is to say, in duration.

I. THE EVOLUTION OF MATTER

Physics was born, in the last century, under the double sign of
fixity and geometry. Its ideal, in its youth, was to find a mathe-
matical explanation of a world imagined as a system of stable
elements in a closed equilibrium. Then, following all science of
the real, it was inevitably drawn by its own progress into becom-
ing a history. Today, positive knowledge of things is identified
with the study of their development. Farther on, in the chapter
on Thought, we shall have to describe and interpret the vital

46

THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

revolution in human consciousness brought about by the quite
modern discovery of duration. Here we need only ask ourselves
how our views about matter are enlarged by the introduction of
this new dimension.

In essence, the change wrought in our experience by the
appearance of what we shall soon call space-time is this, that
everything that up to then we regarded and treated as points in
our cosmological constructions became instantaneous sections of
indefinite temporal fibres. To our opened eyes each element
of things is henceforth extended backwards (and tends to be con-
tinued forwards) as far as the eye can see in such a way that the
entire spatial immensity is no more than a section ' at the time t '
of a trunk whose roots plunge down into the abyss of an un-
fathomable past, and whose branches rise up somewhere to a
future that, at first sight, has no limit. In tliis new perspective the
world appears like a mass in process of transformation. The
universal totum and quantum tend to express and define them-
selves in cosmogenesis. What at this moment are the appearance
(qualitative) assumed from the point of view of the physicists and
the rules followed (quantitative) by this evolution of matter ?

A. The Appearance

As seen in its central portion, which is the most distinct, the
evolution of matter, in current theory, comes back to the gradual
building up by growing complication of the various elements
recognised by physical chemistry. To begin with, at the very
bottom there is a still unresolved simplicity, luminous in nature
and not to be defined in terms of figures. Then, suddenly( ?)'

1 Some years ago this first birth of the corpuscles was imagined rather as a
sudden condensation (as in a saturated environment) of a primordial substance
or stuff", diffused throughout limitless space. Nowadays, for various convergent
reasons, notably Relativity combined with the centrifugal retreat of the
galaxies, physicists prefer to turn to the idea of an explosion pulverising a
primitive quasi-atom within which space-time would be strangulated (in a

47

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

came a swarming of elementary corpuscles, both positive and
negative (protons, neutrons, electrons, photons) : the list in-
creases incessantly. Then the harmonic series of simple bodies,
strung out from hydrogen to uranium on the notes of the atomic
scale. Next follows the immense variety of compound bodies in
which the molecular weights go on increasing up to a certain
critical value above which, as we shall see, we pass on to life.
There is not one term in this long series but must be regarded,
from sound experimental proofs, as being composed of nuclei and
electrons. This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their
origin to arrangements of a single initial corpuscular type is the
beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its
own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law
of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again,
the law of ' complexification V

I say in its own way because, at the stage of the atom, we are
still ignorant of many points in the history of the world.

First of all, must all the elements mount each successive rung
of the ladder from the most simple to the most complicated by a
kind of onto- or phylo-genesis in order to raise themselves in the
series of simple bodies ? Or do the atomic numbers only represent
a rhythmic series of states of equilibrium, sets of pigeon-holes, as
it were, into which nuclei and electrons fall in rough assemblages ?
Moreover, in the one instance as in the other, must we regard the
various combinations of nuclei as being equally possible at any
one time ? Or, on the other hand, must we suppose that on the
whole, statistically, the heavy atoms only appear in a determinate
order, after the lighter ones ?

1 [Complexification in the original: taken over here as the substantival form
of the very rare English verb ' complexify ' — to make complex.]

sort of natural absolute zero) at only some milliards of yean behind us. For
understanding the following pages, the two hypotheses arc equivalent, in the
sense that they put us, the one just as much as the other, in the midst of a
corpuscular multitude from which we cannot escape in any direction; neither
round about nor behind — but possibly forwards (cf. Part 4, chapter 2) through
a singular point of interiorisation.

48

THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE

It does not appear that science is at present able to give
definitive answers to these questions, or to others like them. At
the present time we are less well informed about the ascending
evolution of atoms (I do not say ' the disintegration ') than we
are about the pre-living and living molecules. It is none the
less true, and this is the only point of real importance that concerns
us here, that from its most distant formulations matter reveals
itself to us in a state of genesis or becoming — this genesis allowing
us to distinguish two of the aspects most characteristic of it in its
subsequent stages. First of all, to begin with a critical phase, that
of granulation, which abruptly and once and for all gave birth to
the constituents of the atom and perhaps to the atom itself. Next,
at least from the molecular level, of going on additively by a
process of growing complexity.

Everything docs not happen continuously at any one moment
in the universe. Neither does everything happen everywhere
in it.

So we may summarise in a few lines the ideas about the trans-
formations of matter accepted by science today : but only by con-
sidering the latter in their temporal succession, and without as yet
putting them anywhere within the cosmic expanse. Historically,
the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever
more organised forms of matter. But where, then, do these meta-
morphoses take place, beginning, let us say, with the framework
of molecules ? Is it indifferently at any point in space ? Not at all,
as we all know, but only in the heart and on the surface of the
stars. From having considered the infinitely small elements we
are abruptly compelled to raise our eyes to infinitely great
sidereal masses.

The sidereal masses . . . Our science is at the same time troubled
and fascinated by these colossal unities, which in some ways
behave like atoms, but whose constitution baffles us by its
enormous and — in appearance only ? — irregular complexity.
Perhaps the day will come when some arrangement or periodicity
will become apparent in the stellar distribution both as regards
their composition and their position. Do not a ' stratigraphy '

49

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

and a ' chemistry ' of the heavens inevitably extend the story of
the atoms ?

We have not to entangle ourselves in these still misty per-
spectives. No matter how fascinating they may be, they surround
man rather than lead up to him. On the other hand, because of
its consequences even up to the genesis of the intellect, we must
notice and record the definite connection which, genetically,
associates the atom with the star. For a long time yet physics may
hesitate over the structure to be assigned to the astral immensities.
In the meantime one thing is certain and is enough to guide our
steps along the ways of anthropogenesis. That is that the making
of greater material complexes can only take place under cover of a
previous concentration of the stufl of the universe in nebulae and
suns. Whatever the overall figure of the worlds may be, the
chemical function ot each one of them already has a defuiable
meaning for us. The stars are laboratories in which the evolution
of matter proceeds in the direction ol large molecules, and that
according to determinate quantitative rules which we must now
discuss.

B. The Numerical Laws

What ancient thought half perceived and imagined as a natural
harmony of numbers, modern science has grasped and realised
in the precision of formulae dependent on measurement. Indeed,
we owe our knowledge of the macro-structure and micro-
structure of the universe far more to increasingly accurate
measurements than to direct observations. And, again, it is ever
bolder measurements that have revealed to us the calculable
conditions to which every transformation of matter is subject
according to the force it calls into play.

This is not the place for me to embark on a critical discussion
of the laws of energy. That part of them that is indispensable and
accessible to every world-historian may be simply summarised.
Considered from this biological aspect, broadly speaking, they
may be reduced to the two following principles :

50

THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSB

First Principle. During changes of a physico-chemical type we
do not detect any measurable emergence of new energy.

Every synthesis costs something. That is a fundamental con-
dition of things which persists, as we know, even into the spiritual
zones of being. In every domain, the achievement of progress
requires an excess of effort and therefore of force. Now whence
does this increase come ?

I11 the abstract, one might assume an internal growth of the
world's resources, an absolute increase in mechanical wealth
corresponding to the expanding needs of evolution ; but, in fact,
things seem to happen otherwise. In no case does the energy
required for synthesis appear to be provided by an influx of fresh
capital, but by expenditure. What is gained on one side is lost on
the other. Nothing is constructed except at the price of an
equivalent destruction.

Experimentally and at first sight, when we consider the
universe in its mechanical functions, it does not reveal itself to
us as an open quantum capable of containing an ever greater
reality within its embrace, but as a closed quantum, within which
nothing progresses except by exchange of that which was given
in the beginning.

That is a first appearance.

Second Principle. In every physico-chemical change, adds
thermodynamics, a fraction of the available energy is irrecover-
ably ' entropised ', lost, that is to say, in the form of heat. Doubt-
less it is possible to retain this degraded fraction symbolically in
equations, so as to express that in the operations of matter nothing
is lost any more than anything is created, but that is merely a
mathematical trick. As a matter of fact, from the real evolutionary
standpoint, something is finally burned in the course of every
synthesis in order to pay for that synthesis. The more the energy-
quantum of the world comes into play, the more it is consumed.
Within the scope of our experience, the material concrete
universe seems to be unable to continue on its way indefinitely in
a closed cycle, but traces out irreversibly a curve of obviously
limited development. And thus it is that this universe differ-

5i

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

entiates itself from purely abstract magnitudes and places itself
among the realities which are born, which grow, and which die.
From time it passes into duration ; and finally escapes from
geometry dramatically to become, in its totality as in its parts, an
object of history. 1

Let us translate into images the natural significance of these
two principles of the Conservation and Dissipation of Energy.

We said above that qualitatively the evolution of matter
reveals itself to us, hie et nunc, as a process during which the con-
stituents of the atom are inter-combined and ultra-condensed.
Quantitatively, this transformation now appears to us as a definite,
but costly, operation in which an original impetus slowly becomes
exhausted. Laboriously, step by step, the atomic and molecular
structures become higher and more complex, but the upward
force is lost on the way. Moreover, the same wearing away that
is gradually consuming the cosmos in its totality is at work witlun
the terms of the synthesis, and the higher the terms the quicker
this action takes place. Little by little, the improbable combinations
that they represent become broken down again into more simple
components, which fall back and are disaggregated in the shape-
lessness of probable distributions.

A rocket rising in the wake of time's arrow, that only bursts
to be extinguished ; an eddy rising on the bosom of a descending
current — such then must be our picture of the world.

So says science : and I believe in science : but up to now has
science ever troubled to look at the world other than from
without ?

1 |cf. concluding sections of R. G. Collingwood : Idea oj Nature (O.U.P.
IS>44).|

52

CHAPTER TWO

THE WITHIN OF THINGS

On the scientific plane, the quarrel between materialists and the
upholders of a spiritual interpretation, between finalists and
determinists, still endures. After a century of disputation each
side remains in its original position and gives its adversaries solid
reasons for remaining there.

So far as I understand the struggle, in which I have found
myself involved, it seems to me that its prolongation depends
less on the difficulty that the human mind finds in reconciling
certain apparent contradictions in nature — such as mechanism and
liberty, or death and immortality — as in the difficulty experienced
by two schools of thought in finding a common ground. On the
one hand the materialists insist on talking about objects as though
they only consisted of external actions in transient relationships.
On the other hand the upholders of a spiritual interpretation
are obstinately determined not to go outside a kind of solitary
introspection in which things are only looked upon as being shut
in upon themselves in their ' immanent ' workings. Both fight
on different planes and do not meet ; each only sees half the
problem.

I am convinced that the two points of view require to be
brought into union, and that they soon will unite in a kind of
phenomenology or generalised physic in which the internal
aspect of things as well as the external aspect of the world will be
taken into account. Otherwise, so it seems to me, it is impossible
to cover the totality of the cosmic phenomenon by one coherent
explanation such as science must try to construct.

53

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

We have just described the without of matter in its connections
and its measurable dimensions. Now, in order to advance still
farther in the direction of man, we must extend the bases of our
future edifices into the within of that same matter.

Things have their within ; their ' reserve ', one might say ;
and this appears to stand in definite qualitative or quantitative
connections with the developments that science recognises in the
cosmic energy. These three statements [i.e., that there is a within,
that some connections are qualitative, that others are quantitative]
are the basis of the three sections of this new chapter. To deal
with them, as here I must, obliges me to overlap ' Before Life '
and somewhat to anticipate ' Life ' and ' Thought '. However, is
not the peculiar difficulty of every synthesis that its end is already
implicit in its beginnings ?

i. EXISTENCE

If there is one thing that has been clearly brought out by the
latest advances in physics, it is that in our experience there are
' spheres ' or ' levels ' of different kinds in the unity of nature,
each of them distinguished by the dominance of certain factors
which are imperceptible or negligible in a neighbouring sphere
or on an adjacent level. On the middle scale of our organisms
and of our constructions velocity does not seem to change the
nature of matter. None the less, we now know that at the extreme
values reached by atomic movements it profoundly modifies the
mass of bodies. Among ' normal ' chemical elements, stability
and longevity appear to be the rule : but that illusion has been
destroyed by the discovery of radio-active substances. By the
standards of our human existence, the mountains and stars are a
model of majestic changelessness. Now we discover that,
observed over a sufficiently great duration of time, the earth's
crust changes ceaselessly under our feet, while the heavens sweep
us along in a cyclone of stars.

In all these instances, and in others like to them, there is no

54

THE WITHIN OF THINGS

absolute appearance of a new dimension. Every mass is modified
by its velocity. Every body radiates. Every movement is veiled
in immobility when sufficiently slowed down. But on a different
scale, or at a different intensity, there will become visible some
phenomenon that spreads over the horizon, blots out the other
distinctions, and gives its own particular tonality to the whole
picture.

It is the same with the within of things.

For a reason that will soon appear, objects in the realm of
physico-chemistry arc only made manifest by their outward
determinisms.

In the eyes of the physicist, nothing exists legitimately, at
least up to now, except the without of things. The same intel-
lectual attitude is still permissible in the bacteriologist, whose
cultures (apart from some substantial difficulties) are treated as
laboratory reagents. But it is already more difficult in the realm
of plants. It tends to become a gamble in the case of a biologist
studying the behaviour of insects or coclcnterates. It seems merely
futile with regard to the vertebrates. Finally, it breaks down
completely with man, in whom the existence of a within can
no longer be evaded, because it is the object of a direct intuition
and the substance of all knowledge.

The apparent restriction of the phenomenon of consciousness
to the higher forms of life has long served science as an excuse for
eliminating it from its models of the universe. A queer exception,
an aberrant function, an epiphenomenon — thought was classed
under one or other of these heads in order to get rid of it. But
what would have happened to modern physics if radium had been
classified as an ' abnormal substance ' without further ado ?
Clearly, the activity of radium had not been neglected, and could
not be neglected, because, being measurable, it forced its way
into the external web of matter — whereas consciousness, in order
to be integrated into a world-system, necessitates consideration
of the existence of a new aspect or dimension in the stuff of the
universe. We shrink from the attempt, but which of us does not
in both cases see an identical problem facing research workers,

55

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

which have to be solved by the same method, namely, to discover
the universal hidden beneath the exceptional ?

Latterly we have experienced it too often to admit of any
further doubt : an irregularity in nature is only the sharp exacer-
bation, to the point of perceptible disclosure, of a property of
things diffused throughout the universe, in a state which eludes
our recogmtion of its presence. Properly observed, even if only
in one spot, a phenomenon necessarily has an omnipresent value
and roots by reason of the fundamental unity of the world.
Whither does this rule lead us if we apply it to the instance of
human ' self-knowledge ' ?

' Consciousness is completely evident only in man ' we are
tempted to say, ' therefore it is an isolated instance of no interest
to science.'

' Consciousness is evident in man,' we must continue, correct-
ing ourselves, ' therefore, half-seen in this one flash of light, it has
a cosmic extension, and as such is surrounded by an aura of
indefinite spatial and temporal extensions.'

The conclusion is pregnant with consequences, and yet I
cannot see how, by sound analogy with all the rest of science, we
can escape from it.

It is impossible to deny that, deep within ourselves, an
' interior ' appears at the heart of beings, as it were seen through
a rent. This is enough to ensure that, in one degree or another,
this ' interior ' should obtrude itself as existing everywhere in
nature from all time. Since the stuff of the universe has an inner
aspect at one point of itself, there is necessarily a double aspect to
its structure, that is to say in every region of space and time — in
the same way, for instance, as it is granular : co-extensiv e with their
Without, there is a Within to things.

The consequent picture of the world daunts our imagination,
but it is in fact the only one acceptable to our reason. Taken at
its lowest point, exactly where we put ourselves at the beginning
of these pages, primitive matter is something more than the
particulate swarming so marvellously analysed by modern physics.
Beneath this mechanical layer we must think of a ' biological '

56

THE WITHIN OF THINGS

layer that is attenuated to the uttermost, but yet is absolutely
necessary to explain the cosmos in succeeding ages. The within,
consciousness 1 and then spontaneity — three expressions for the
same thing. It is no more legitimate for us experimentally to fix
an absolute beginning to these three expressions of one and the
same thing than to any other lines of the universe.

In a coherent perspective of the world : life inevitably assumes a
' pre-life 'for as far back before it as the eye can see}

In that case — and the objection will come from material-
ists and upholders of spirituality alike — if everything in
nature is basically living, or at least pre-living, how is it possible
for a mechanistic science of matter to be built up and to
triumph ?

Determinate without, and ' free ' within — would the two
aspects of things be irreducible and incommensurable ? If so,
where is your solution ?

The answer to this difficulty is already implicit in what we

1 Here, and throughout this book, the term ' consciousness ' is taken in its
widest sense to indicate every kind of psychism, from the most rudimentary
forms of interior perception imaginable to the human phenomenon of reflec-
tive thought.

8 These pages had been written for some time when I was surprised to find
their substance in some masterly lines recently written by J. B. S. Haldane :
' We do not find obvious evidence of life or ruiiid in so-called inert matter,
and we naturally study them most easily where they arc most completely
manifested ; but if die scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately
find them, at least in rudimentary forms, alJ through the universe.'
And he goes on to add these words which my readers would do well to
recall when I come to unveil (with all due reservations and corrections) the
perspective of the ' Omega Point ' :
' Now, if the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our
brain can produce our consciousness, the idea becomes vastly more plausible
that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine
what Comte calls a Great Being.' (Essay on Science and Ethics in The
Inequality oj Man, Chatto, 1932, p. 113.)
What 1 say is thus not absurd. Moreover, any metaphysician must rejoice
to discover that even in the eyes of physics the idea of absolutely brute matter
(that is to say, of a pure ' transient ') is only a first very rough approximation of
our experience.

57

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

have said above about the diversity of ' spheres of experience '
superposed in the interior of the world. It will appear more
clearly when we have discerned the qualitative laws that govern
in their growth and variation the manifestations of what we have
just called the within of things.

2. THE QUALITATIVE LAWS OF GROWTH

To harmonise objects in time and space, without presuming to
determine the conditions that can rule their deepest being : to
establish an experimental chain of succession in nature, not a
union of ontological ' causality ; to see, in other words, and not
to explain — this, let it not be forgotten, is the sole aim of the
present study.

From this phenomenal point of view (which is the scientific
point of view) can one go beyond the position where our analysis
of the stuff of the universe has just stopped ? In this last we have
recognised the existence of a conscious inner face that everywhere
duplicates the ' material ' external face, which alone is commonly
considered by science. Can we go further and define the rules
according to which this second face, for the most part entirely
hidden, suddenly shows itself, and then as suddenly bursts through
into certain other regions of our experience ?

Yes, so it seems, and even quite easily, provided there are
placed one after the other dirce observations that each one of us
could have made, but which do not take on their true value until
wc think of linking them together.

A. First Observation

Considered in its pre-vital state, the within of things, whose
reality even in the nascent forms of matter we have just admitted,
must not be thought of as forming a continuous film, but as
assuming the same granulation as matter itself.

58

THE WITHIN OF THINGS

Soon we shall have to return to this essential point. As far
back as we began to descry them, the first living things reveal
themselves to our experience as kinds of ' mega- ' or ' ultra- '
molecules, both in size and in number: a bewildering multitude
of microscopic nuclei. Which means that for reasons of homo-
geneity and continuity, the pre-living can be divined, below the
horizon, as an object sharing in the corpuscular structure and pro-
perties of the world. Looked at from within, as well as observed
from without, the stuff of the universe thus tends likewise to be
resolved backwardly into a dust of particles that are (i) perfectly
alike among themselves (at least if they are observed from a
great distance) ; (ii) each co-extensive with the whole of the
cosmic realm ; (iii) mysteriously connected among themselves,
finally, by a global energy. In these depths the world's two
aspects, external and internal, correspond point by point. So
much is this so that one may pass from the one to the other on the
sole condition that ' mechanical interaction ' in the definition
of the partial centres of the universe given above is replaced by
' consciousness '.

Atomicity is a common property oj the Within and the Without of
things.

B. Second Observation

Virtually homogeneous among themselves in the beginning, the
elements of consciousness, exacdy as the elements of matter
which they subtend, complicate and differentiate their nature,
little by little, with the passage of duration. From this point
of view and considered solely from the experimental aspect, con-
sciousness reveals itself as a cosmic property of variable size
subject to a global transformation. Taken on the ascent, this huge
phenomenon that wc shall have to follow all along the develop-
ment of life right up to the appearance of thought, has ended by
appearing commonplace. Followed in the opposite direction, it
leads us, as wc have already seen, to the less familiar idea of

59

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

inferior states that are ever less well defined and, as it were, dis-
tended.

Refracted rearwards along the course oj evolution, consciousness
displays itself qualitatively as a spectrum of shifting shades whose lower
terms are lost in the night.

c.

Third Observation

Finally, let us take from two different regions of this spectrum
two particles of consciousness that are at unlike stages ot evolu-
tion. As we have seen, there corresponds to each of them, by
construction, a certain definite material grouping of which they
form the within. Let us compare these two external groupings
the one with the other and ask ourselves how they are arranged
with regard to each other and with regard to the portion ot
consciousness that each of them encloses.
The answer comes at once.

Whatever instance we may think of, we may be sure that
every time a richer and better organised structure will correspond
to the more developed consciousness.

The simplest form of protoplasm is already a substance of
unheard-of complexity. This complexity increases in geometrical
progression as we pass from the protozoon higher and higher up
the scale of the metazoa. And so it is for all the rest always and
everywhere. Here again, the phenomenon is so obvious that we
have long since ceased to be astonished by it. Yet its importance is
decisive. For thanks to it we possess a tangible ' parameter '
allowing us to connect both the internal and the external hlms of
the world, not only in their position (point by point), but also, as
we shall verify later on, in their motion.

The degree of concentration of a consciousness varies in

inverse ratio to the simplicity of the material compound lined by

it Or again : a consciousness is that much more perfected

according as it lines a richer and better organised material edifice.

Spiritual perfection (or conscious ' centreity ') and material syn-

60

THE WITHIN OP THINGS

thesis (or complexity) are hut the two aspects or connected parts of one
and the same phenomenon. 1

And now we have arrived, ipso facto, at the solution of the
problem posed for us. We are seeking a qualitative law of
development that from sphere to sphere should be capable of
explaining, first of all the invisibility, then the appearance, and
then the gradual dominance of the within in comparison to the
without of things. This law reveals itself once the universe is
thought of as passing from State A, characterised by a very large
number of very simple material elements (that is to say, with a
very poor within), to State B defined by a smaller number of
very complex groupings (that is to say, with a much richer
within).

Ln State A, the centres of consciousness, because they are
extremely numerous and extremely loose at the same time, only
reveal themselves by overall effects which arc subject to the laws
of statistics. Collectively, that is, they obey the laws of mathe-
matics. This is the proper field of physico-chemistry.

In State B, on the other hand, these Jess numerous 2 and at
the same time more highly individualised elements gradually
escape from the slavery of large numbers. They allow their basic
non-measurable spontaneity to break through and reveal itself.
We can begin to see them and follow them one by one, and in so
doing we have access to the world of biology.

In sum, all the rest of this essay wiLl be nothing but the story
of the struggle in the universe between the unified multiple and
the unorganised multitude : the application throughout of the
great Law of complexity and consciousness : a law that itself implies
a psychically convergent structure and curvature of the world.

But we must not go too quickly, and since we are still con-

1 From this aspect one might say that, on the phenomenal plane, each being
is constructed like an ellipse on two conjugate foci : 1 tocus ot material organi-
sation and a tocus ot psychic centering — the two loci varying solidarity and in
the same sense.

1 As we shall see, this is despite the specifically vital mechanism of multipli-
cation.

61

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

cerned with pre-life let us only keep in mind that, from the
qualitative viewpoint, there is no kind of contradiction involved
in admitting that a universe of mechanistic appearance may
be built up of ' liberties ' — provided that the liberties are therein
contained in a sufficiently fine state of division and imperfection.

3. SPIRITUAL ENERGY

There is no concept more familiar to us than that of spiritual
energy, yet there is none that is more opaque scientifically. On
the one hand the objective reality of psychical effort and work is
so well established that the whole of ethics rests on it and, on the
other hand, the nature of this inner power is so intangible that
the whole description of the universe in mechanical terms has had
no need to take account of it, but has been successfully completed
in deliberate disregard of its reality.

The difficulties we still encounter in trying to hold together
spirit and matter in a reasonable perspective are nowhere more
harshly revealed. Nowhere either is the need more urgent of
building a bridge between the two banks of our existence — the
physical and the moral — if we wish the material and spiritual
sides of our activities to be mutually enlivened.

To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul, in a
coherent manner: science has provisionally decided to ignore
the question, and it would be very convenient for us to do the
same. Unfortunately, or fortunately, caught up as we are here in
the logic of a system where the within of things has just as much
or even more value than their without, we collide with the diffi-
culty head on. It is impossible to avoid the clash : we must
advance.

Naturally the following considerations do not pretend to be
a truly satisfactory solution of the problem of spiritual energy.
Their aim is merely to show by means of one example what, in
my opinion, an integral science of nature should adopt as its line
of research, and the kind of interpretation it should follow.

62

THE WITHIN OF THINGS

A. The Problem of the Two Energies

Since the inner face of the world is manifest deep within our
human consciousness, and there reflects upon itself, it would
seem that we have only got to look at ourselves in order to
understand the dynamic relationships existing between the within
and the without of things at a given point in the universe.

In fact so to do is one of the most difficult of all things.

We are perfectly well aware in our concrete actions that the
two opposite forces combine. The motor works, but we cannot
make out the method, which seems to be contradictory. What
makes the crux — and an irritating one at that — of the problem
of spiritual energy for our reason is the heightened sense that we
bear without ceasing in ourselves that our action seems at once
to depend on, and yet to be independent of, material forces.

First of all, the dependence. This is depressingly and magnifi-
cently obvious. ' To think, we must eat.' That blunt statement
expresses a whole economy, and reveals, according to the way
we look at it, either the tyranny of matter or its spiritual power.
The loftiest speculation, the most burning love are, as we know
only too well, accompanied and paid for by an expenditure of
physical energy. Sometimes we need bread, sometimes wine,
sometimes a drug or a hormone injection, sometimes die stimula-
tion of a colour, sometimes the magic of a sound which goes in
at our ears as a vibration and reaches our brains in the form of
inspiration.

Without the slightest doubt there is something through which
material and spiritual energy hold together and are comple-
mentary. In last analysis, somehow or other, there must be a single
energy operating in the world. And the first idea that occurs to
us is that the ' soul ' must be as it were a focal point of transforma-
tion at which, from all the points of nature, the forces of bodies
converge, to become intcriorised and sublimated in beauty and
truth.

Yet, seductive though it be, the idea of the direct transforma-

63

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

tion of one of these two energies into the other is no sooner
glimpsed than it has to be abandoned. As soon as we try to
couple them together, their mutual independence becomes as
clear as their interrelation.

Once again : ' To think, we must eat.' But what a variety of
thoughts we get out of one slice of bread ! Like the letters of the
alphabet, which can equally well be assembled into nonsense as
into the most beautiful poem, the same calories seem as indifferent
as they are necessary to the spiritual values they nourish.

The two energies — of mind and matter — spread respectively
through the two layers of the world (the within and the without)
have, taken as a whole, much the same demeanour. They are
constandy associated and in some way pass into each other. But
it seems impossible to establish a simple correspondence between
their curves. On the one hand, only a minute fraction of
' physical ' energy is used up in the highest exercise of spiritual
energy ; on the other, this minute fraction, once absorbed, results
on the internal scale in the most extraordinary oscillations.

A quantitative disproportion of this kind is enough to make
us reject the naive notion of ' change of form ' (or direct trans-
formation) — and hence all hope of discovering a ' mechanical
equivalent ' for will or thought. Between the within and the
without of things, the interdependence of energy is incontestable.
But it can in all probability only be expressed by a complex sym-
bolism in which terms of a different order are employed.

B. A Line of Solution

To avoid a fundamental dualism, at once impossible and anti-
scientific, and at the same time to safeguard the natural complexity
of the stuff of the universe, I accordingly propose the following
as a basis for all that is to emerge later.

We shall assume that, essentially, all energy is psychic in
nature ; but add that in each particular element this fundamental
energy is divided into two distinct components : a tangential

64

THE WITHIN OF THINGS

energy which links the element with all others of the same order
(that is to say, of the same complexity and the same centricity)
as itself in the universe ; and a radial energy which draws it towards
ever greater complexity and centricity — in other words forwards. 1

From this initial state, and supposing that it disposes of a
certain free tangential energy, the particle thus constituted must
obviously be in a position to increase its internal complexity in
association with neighbouring particles, and thereupon (since its
centricity is automatically increased) to augment its radial energy.
The latter will then be able to react in its turn in the form of a
new arrangement in the tangential field. And so on.

In this view, whereby tangential energy represents ' energy '
as such, as generally understood by science, the only difficulty is
to explain the interplay of tangential arrangements in terms of
the laws of thermo-dynamics. As regards this we may remark
the following :

a. First of all, since the variation of radial energy in function of
tangential energy is effected, according to our hypothesis, by the
intervention of an arrangement, it follows that as much as you like
of the first may be linked with as little as you like of the second —
for a highly perfected arrangement may only require an extremely
small amount of work. This fits in with the facts noted in section
A above.

h. Moreover, in the system here proposed, we are paradoxically
led to admit that cosmic energy is constantly increasing, not only
in its radial form, but — which is much more serious — in its
tangential one (for the tension between elements increases with

1 Let it be noted in passing that the less an element is ' centred ' (i.e. the
feebler its radial energy) the more wiU its tangential energy reveal itself in
powerful mechanical effects. Between strongly ' centred ' particle* (i.e. of
high radial energy) the tangential seems to become ' interiorised ' and to disap-
pear from the physicist's view. Probably we have here an auxiliary principle
which could help to explain the apparent conservation of energy in the
universe (see para. b. below). We probably ought to recognise two sorts of
tangential energy, one of radiation (at its maximum with the lowest radial
values, as in the atom), the other of arrangement (only appreciable with the
highest radial values, as in living creatures, man in particular).

65

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

their ccntricity itself). This would seem to be in direct contra-
diction with the law of conservation of energy. It must be noted,
however, that this increase of the tangential of the second kind
(the only one troublesome for physics) only becomes appreciable
with very high radial values (as in man, for instance, and social
tensions). Below this level, and for an approximately constant
number of initial particles in the universe, the sum of the cosmic
tangential energies remains practically and statistically invariable
in the course of transformations. And this is all that science
requires.

c. Lastly, since according to our reading, the entire edifice of
the universe is constantly supported at every phase of its pro-
gressive ' centration ' by its primary arrangements, it is plain that
its achievement will be conditioned up to the highest stages by a
certain primordial quantum of free tangential energy, which will
gradually exhaust itself, following the principle of entropy.

Looked at as a whole, this picture satisfies the requirements of
reality.

Three questions remain still unanswered, however :

a. By virtue of what special energy does the universe propagate
itself along its main axis in the less probable direction of the higher
forms of complexity and centricity ?

b. Is there a definite limit and end to the ' elemental ' value and
to the sum total of the radial energies developed in the course of
transformation ?

c. Is this final and resultant form of radial energies, supposing it
exists, subject to reversal ? Is it destined one day to start disinte-
grating so as to satisfy the principle of entropy, and fall back
indefinitely into pre-living and still lower centres, by the exhaus-
tion and gradual levelling-down of the free tangential energy
contained in the successive envelopes of the universe from which
it has emerged ?

To be answered satisfactorily, these three questions must
await a much later chapter, when the study of man will have led
us to the concept of a superior pole to the world — the omega
point.

66

CHAPTER THREE

THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES

Somb thousands of millions of years ago, not, it would appear,
by a regular process of astral evolution, but as the result of some
unbelievable accident (a brush with another star ? an internal
upheaval ?) a fragment of matter composed of particularly stable
atoms was detached from the surface of the sun. Without
breaking the bonds attaching it to the rest, and just at the right
distance from the mother-star to receive a moderate radiation,
this fragment began to condense, to roll itself up, to take shape. 1
Containing within its globe and orbit the future of man, another
heavenly body— a planet this time — had been born.

So far our eyes have been straying over the unlimited layers
in which the stuff of the universe is deployed.

From now on let us concentrate our attention on this diminu-
tive, obscure, but fascinating object which had just appeared. It
is the only place in the world in which we are so far able to study
the evolution of matter in its ultimate phases, and as far as our-
selves.

Let us have a look at the earth in its early stages, so fresh yet
charged with latent powers, as it balances in the chasms of the
past.

1 Once again astronomers seem to be returning to a more Laplaccan con-
cept of" the birth of planets by the effect of knots and bulges in the cloud of
cosmic dust originally floating round each star.

67

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

i. THE WITHOUT

What arouses the physicist's interest in this globe — new-born,
it would seem, by a stroke of chance in the cosmic mass — is the
presence of composite chemical bodies not to be observed any-
. where else. 1 At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars,
matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple
bodies exist on these incandescent stars. On the earth this sim-
plicity of the elements still obtains at the periphery, in the more
or less ionised gases of the atmosphere and the stratosphere and,
probably, far below, in the metals of the ' barysphcre '. But
between these two extremes comes a long series of complex
substances, harboured and produced only by stars that have 'gone
out '. Arranged in successive zones, they demonstrate from the
start the powers of synthesis contained in the universe. First the
siliceous zone, preparing the solid crust of the planet. Next
the zone of water and carbonic acid, enclosing the silicates in an
unstable, mobile and penetrating envelope.

In other words we have the barysphere, lithosphere, hydro-
sphere, atmosphere and stratosphere.

This fundamental composition may have varied and become
elaborated in detail, but by and large it can be said to have estab-
lished itself from the beginning. And it is from it that geo-
chemistry develops progressively in two different directions.

A. The Crystallising World

In one direction, much the more common, terrestrial energy has
tended from the outset to be given off and liberated. Silicates,
water, carbon dioxide — these essential oxides were formed by
burning up and neutralising (alone or in association with other
simple bodies) the affinities of their elements. Carrying the

1 Except, chough very fugitively, in the atmosphere of the planets nearest
to our own.

68

THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES

scheme progressively further, the result is the rich variety of the
' mineral world '.

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world
than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely
analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs
in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transforma-
tion of a mineral species.

But it is a world relatively poor in compounds, because of the
narrow limit to the internal architecture of its elements. Accord-
ing to latest estimates, we have found only a few hundred silicates
in nature.

Looking at them ' biologically ' we may say it is the character-
istic of minerals (as of so many other organisms that have become
incurably fixed) to have chosen a road which closed them pre-
maturely in upon themselves. By their innate structure the mole-
cules are unfitted for growth. To develop beyond a certain size
they have in a way to get out of themselves, to have recourse to
a trick of purely external association, whereby the atoms are
linked together without true combination or union. Sometimes
we find them in strings as in jade, sometimes in planes as in mica,
and sometimes in a solid quincunx as in garnet.

In this way, by simple juxtaposition of atoms or relatively
simple atomic groups in geometrical patterns, regular aggregates
may be produced whose level of composition is often very high,
but they correspond to no properly centred units ; they are an
indefinitely extended mosaic of small elements — such as we know
to be the structure of a crystal, which, thanks to X-rays, can now
be photographed. And such is the organisation, simple and stable,
which the condensed matter around us has by and large perforce
adopted from its origins.

Considered in the mass, the earth is veiled in geometry as far
back as we can see. It crystallises.

But not completely.

69

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

b. The Polymerising World

In the course of and by virtue of the initial advance of the elements
on earth towards the crystalline state, energy was constandy
released and liberated (just as, today, it is released by mankind as
a result of machinery). This was constantly augmented by energy
furnished by the atomic decomposition of radio-active substances
and by that given off by solar rays. Where could this surplus
energy, available on the surface of the earth in its early stages, go
to ? Was it merely to be lost around the globe in obscure emana-
tions ?

Another much more probable hypothesis occurs to us when
we look at the world today. When it became too weak to escape
in incandescence, the free energy of the new-born eartli became
capable of reacting on itself in a work of synthesis. Thus, as
today, it passed with the absorption of heat into building up
certain carbonates, hydrates or hydrites, and nitrates like those
which astonish us by their power to increase indefinitely the
complexity and instability of their elements. This is the realm of
polymerisation* in which die particles ' concatenate ', group
themselves and exchange positions, as in crystals, in a theoretically
endless network. Only, this time it is molecules with molecules in
such a way as to form on each occasion [by closed or at all events limited
combination) an ever larger and more complex molecule.

This world of organic compounds ' is ours. We live among
diem and are made of them. So intimately do we see it as con-
nected with the phenomena of Life that we have got into the habit
of considering it only in direct association with life already con-
stituted. Moreover, despite its incredible wealth of forms, which
far surpasses the variety of mineral compounds, it concerns such
a tiny part of the substance of the earth that we are instinctively

1 1 crust I shall be forgiven (as later in the case or " orthogenesis ') tor using
this term in so generalised a sense, i.e. to include (as well as thesenct polymerisa-
tion of the chemists) the entire process of ' additive complexiricatioii ' pro-
ducing large molecules.

70

THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES

inclined to relegate it to a minor position of geo-chemistry—
like the ammonia and oxides that surround the lightning's
flash.

If we wish later to fix the place of man in nature, it seems to
me essential to restore to this phenomenon its true physiognomy
and its ' seniority '.

Whatever the quantitative disproportion of the masses they
respectively involve, inorganic and organic chemistry are only
and can only be two inseparable facets of one and the same
telluric operation. And the second, no less than the first, must be
regarded as already under way in the infancy of the earth. We
are back at the refrain that runs all the way through this book.
In the world, nothing could ever burst forth as final across the different
thresholds successively traversed by evolution (however critical they be)
which has not already existed in an obscure and primordial way. If
the organic had not existed on earth from the first moment at
which it was possible, it would never have begun later.

There is good reason to think that around our nascent planet,
in addition to the inchoation of a metallic barysphere, a siliceous
lithospherc, a hydrosphere and an atmosphere, there was the out-
line of a special envelope, the antithesis, we might say, of the first
four : the temperate zone of polymerisation, in which water,
ammonia and carbon dioxide were already floating in the rays of
the sun. To ignore that tenuous fdm would be to deprive the
infant earth of its most essential adornment. For, as we shall see,
it is in this that the ' within of the earth ' was soon to be gradually
concentrated (if we hold to what I have already said).

2. THE WITHIN

When I speak of the ' within ' of the earth, I do not of course mean
those material depths in which — a few miles beneath our feet —
lurks one of the most vexatious mysteries of science : the
chemical nature and the exact physical condition of the internal
regions of the globe. The ' within ' is used here, as in the preceding

71

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

chapter, to denote the ' psychic ' face of that portion of the stuff
of the cosmos enclosed from the beginning of time within the
narrow scope of the early earth. In that fragment of sidereal
matter which has just been isolated, as in every other part of the
universe, the exterior world must inevitably be lined at every
point with an interior one. This we have shown already. Only
here the conditions have changed. Matter no longer spreads out
beneath our eyes in diffuse and undehnable layers. It coils up
round itself in a closed volume. How will its ' inner ' layer react to
such involution?

First let it be noted that, by the very fact of the individualisa-
tion of our planet, a certain mass of elementary consciousness was
originally emprisoned in the matter of earth. Some scientists have
felt obliged to invest some interstellar germs with the power of
fecundating cooling stars. This hypothesis disfigures, without
explaining, the wonderful phenomenon of life, with its noble
corollary, the phenomenon of man. It is in fact quite useless.
Why should we turn to space to look for a fecundating principle
for the earth — which is incomprehensible in any case ? By its
initial chemical composition, the early earth is itself, and in its
totality, the incredibly complex germ we are seeking. Con-
genially, if I may use the word, it already carried pre-life within
it, and this, moreover, in definite quantity. The whole question is to
define how, from this primitive and essentially elastic quantum,
all the rest has emerged.

To form an idea of the first phases of this evolution it will be
enough to compare, stage by stage, on the one hand the general
laws we have felt able to lay down for the development of spiritual
energy, and on the other the physico-chemical conditions we
have just acknowledged in the nascent earth. We have said that
spiritual energy, by its very nature, increases in ' radial ' value,
positively, absolutely, and without determinable limits, in step
with the increasing chemical complexity of the elements of which
it represents the inner lining. But the chemical complexity of the
earth increases in conformity with the laws of thermo-dynamics
in the particular, superficial zone in which its elements polymerise.

72

THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES

If we put these two propositions side by side wc see that they
interweave and shed light upon each other without ambiguity.
With one accord they tell us that prc-life is no sooner enclosed
in the nascent earth than it emerges from the torpor to which it
appeared to have been condemned by its diffusion in space. Its
activities, hitherto dormant, are now set in motion pari passu
with the awakening of the forces of synthesis enclosed in matter.
And at one and the same stroke, over the whole surface of the
new-formed globe, the tension of internal freedoms begins to
rise.

Let us look more attentively at this mysterious surface.

A character to be noted at the outset is the extremely small
size and the extremely great number of the particles of which it
consists. For a thickness of some miles, in water, in air, in muddy
deposits, ultra-microscopic grains of protein are thickly strewn
over the surface of the earth. Our imaginations boggle at the
mere thought of counting the flakes of this snow. Yet if we
take it that pre-life has already emerged in the atom, are not these
myriads of large molecules just what we ought to expect?

But there is another point to consider.

In a sense more remarkable than their multitude (and as
important to keep in mind for future developments) is the solid-
arity due to their very genesis which unites the specks of this
primordial dust of consciousness. That which permits the growth
of elementary freedoms is, essentially, I repeat, the growing
synthesis of the molecules they subtend. And let me also repeat
that this synthesis itself would never take place if the globe as a
whole did not enfold within a closed surface the layers of its
substance.

Thus, wherever we look on earth, the growth of the ' within '
only takes place thanks to a double related involution, the coiling up
of the molecule upon itself and the coiling up of the planet upon
itself. 1 The initial quantum of consciousness contained in our
terrestrial world is not formed merely of an aggregate of particles

1 Precisely the conditions wc find later on, at the other end of evolution,
pre&iding over the genesis of the ' noosphere '.

73

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

caught fortuitously in the same net. It represents a correlated
mass of infinitesimal centres structurally bound together by the
conditions of their origin and development.

Here again, but in a better defined field and on a higher level,
we find the fundamental condition characteristic of primordial
matter — the unity of plurality. The earth was probably born by
accident ; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of
evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was
immediately made use of and recast into something naturally
directed. By the very mechanism of its birth, the film in which
the ' within ' of the earth was concentrated and deepened emerges
under our eyes in the form of an organic whole in which no ele-
ment can any longer be separated from those surrounding it.
Another ' indivisible ' has appeared at the heart of the great
' indivisible ' which is the universe. In truth, a pre-biosphere.

And this is the envelope which, taken in its entirety, is to
be our sole preoccupation from now on.

As wc continue peering into the abysses of the past, wc can
sec its colour changing.

From age to age it increases in intensity. Something is going
to burst out upon the early earth, and this dung is Life.

BOOK TWO

LIFE

74

CHAPTER ONB

THE ADVENT OF LIFE

After what wc have said about the latent germinal powers of
the early earth, it might be thought that nothing had been left in
nature which could pin-point the beginning of life, and that there-
fore my chapter heading is inappropriate. The mineral world and
the world of life seem two antithetical creations when viewed by
a summary glance in their extreme forms and on the intermediary
scale of our human organisms ; but to a deeper study, when we
force our way right down to the microscopic level and beyond to
the infinitesimal, or (which comes to the same thing) far back
along the scale of time, they seem quite odierwise — a single mass
gradually melting in on itself.

At such depths all differences seem to become tenuous. For
a long time we have known how impossible it is to draw a clear
line between animal and plant on the unicellular level. Nor can
we draw one (as we shall see later) between ' living ' protoplasm
and ' dead ' proteins on the level of the very big molecular
accumulations. We still use the word ' dead ' for these latter
unclassified substances, but have we not already come to the
conclusion that they would be incomprehensible if they did not
possess already, deep down in themselves, some sort of rudi-
mentary psyche ?

So, in a sense, we can no more fix an absolute zero in time (as
was once supposed) for the advent of life than for that of any
other experimental reality. On the experimental and phenomeno-
logical plane, a given universe and each of its parts can only have
one and the same duration, to which there is no backward limit.

77

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Thus each thing extends itself and pushes its roots into the past,
ever farther back, by that which makes it most itself. Everything,
in some extremely attenuated extension of itself, has existed from
the very first. Nothing can be done in a direct way to counter
this basic condition of our knowledge.

But to have realised and accepted once and for all that each
new being has and must have a cosmic etnbryogenesis in no way
invalidates the reality of its historic birth.

In every domain, when anything exceeds a certain measure-
ment, it suddenly changes its aspect, condition or nature. The
curve doubles back, the surface contracts to a point, the solid
disintegrates, the liquid boils, the germ cell divides, intuition
suddenly bursts on the piled up facts . . . Critical points have been
reached, rungs on the ladder, involving a change of state — jumps
of all sorts in the course of development. Henceforward this is
the only way in which science can speak of a ' first instant '.
But it is none the less a true way.

In this new and more complicated sense — even after (precisely
after) what we have said about pre-lifc — our task, now, is to
consider and define a beginning of life.

Through a duration to which we can give no definite measure
but know to be immense, the earth, cool enough now to allow
the formation on its surface of the chains of molecules of the car-
bon type, was probably covered by a layer of water from which
emerged the first traces of future continents. To an observer
equipped with even the most modern instruments of research,
our earth would probably have seemed an inanimate desert. Its
waters would have left no trace of mobile particles even upon the
finest of our filters, and the most powerful microscope would
only liave detected inert aggregates.

Then at a given moment, after a sufficient lapse of time, those
same waters here and there must unquestionably have begun
writhing with nunutc creatures. And from that initial prolifera-
tion stemmed the amazing profusion of organic matter whose
matted complexity came to form the last (or rather the last but
one) of the envelopes of our planet : the biosphere.

7«

THE ADVENT OF LIFE

No amount of historical research will ever reveal the details
of this story. Unless the science of tomorrow is able to recon-
struct the process in the laboratory, we shall probably never find
any material vestige of this emergence of the microscopic from
the molecular, of the organic from the chemical, of the living
from the prc-living. One thing is certain, however — a meta-
morphosis of tills sort could not be the result of a simple con-
tinuous process. By analogy with all we have learnt from the
comparative study of natural developments, we must postulate at
this particular moment of terrestrial evolution a coming to matur-
ity, a threshold, a crisis of the first magnitude, the beginning of a
new order.

We shall now try to determine what must have been on the
one hand the nature, on the other the spatial and temporal
modalities of this transformation ; and find an explanation that
will fit in both with what we presume to have been the conditions
on die early earth and with those of the earth as it is today.

i. THE TRANSIT TO LIFE

Seen from outside and materially, the best we can say at the
moment is that life properly speaking begins with the cell. For a
century science has concentrated its attention on tlus chemically
and structurally ultra-complex unit, and the longer it continues
to do so the more evident it becomes that in it lies the secret of
which we have as yet no more than an inkling — the secret of the
connection between the two worlds of physics and biology. The
cell is the natural granule oj lijc in the same way as the atom is
the natural granule of simple, elemental matter. If we are to take
the measure of the transit to life and determine its precise nature,
we must try to understand the cell.

But to understand it, how are we to regard it ?

Volumes have been written about the cell. Whole libraries
are insufficient to contain all that has been meticulously observed
concerning its texture, the functions of its ' cytoplasm ' and

79

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

nucleus, the way it divides, and its connection with heredity. Yet,
in itself, it is still a closed book, still as enigmatic as ever. It seems
as though, once we have reached a certain depth in our explana-
tion, we find ourselves reduced to marking time in front of an
impregnable fortress.

It might seem that the histological and physiological methods
of analysis have given us all we could expect of them and that,
to get any farther, our approach must be made from another
angle.

For obvious reasons, cytology has so far proceeded with an
almost exclusively biological oudook. The cell has been viewed
as a micro-organism, or an example of proto-life, that must be
interpreted in relation to its highest forms and associations.

But this attitude has left half our problem in the dark. Like the
moon in its first quarter, the cclJ has been illumined only on the
side that looks towards the highest forms of life, leaving the odier
side (the layers we have called pre-life) floating in darkness. That
is most likely the reason scientifically speaking why its mystery
has been so unduly prolonged.

Marvellous as it is, marvellous as it seems to us in its isolation
among the other constructions of matter, the cell, like everything
else in the world, cannot be understood (i.e. incorporated in a
coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolu-
tionary line between a past and a future. We have turned a good
deal of attention to its development and its differentiations. It is
on its origins, that is to say on its roots in the inorganic, that we
must now focus our researches if we want to grasp the essence of
its novelty.

Despite what experience has taught us in every other field, we
have let ourselves become too much accustomed to thinking of
the cell as an object without antecedents. Let us see what happens
if wc regard it and treat it (as we certainly should) as something
at one and the same time both the outcome of long preparation and
yet profoundly original, that is to say, as a thing that is born.

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THE ADVENT OF LIFE

A. Micro-organisms and Mega-molecules

First of all the preparatory process.

When we try to look at the beginning of life in relation to its
antecedents rather than its consequents, we at once notice some-
thing which, strangely enough, had never struck us before. It is
in and by means of the cell that the molecular world ' appears in
person ' (if I may so express myself), touching, passing into, and
disappearing in the higher constructions of life.

Perhaps a word of explanation is needed.

"When we look at bacteria, it is always against a background
of the higher plants and animals, and this blinds our vision. What
we should do is start from another angle, shutting our eyes to all
the more advanced forms in living nature and even to most of the
protozoa because, in their main lines, they are almost as differen-
tiated as metazoa. In the latter, moreover, let us ignore the highly
specialised and often very large cells of the nervous, muscular and
reproductive systems. In other words let us confine ourselves to
the more or less independent elements, externally amorphous or
polymorphous, such as abound in natural ferments, are present
in our blood and accumulate in our organs in the form of con-
nective tissue, in other words let us confine ourselves to what
appear the simplest and the most primitive cells in nature today.
This done, let us look at this corpuscular mass in relation to the
matter beneath it. Can we fail for a moment to see the obvious
relationship, in both composition and appearance, between the
proto-living world on the one hand and the physico-chemical
one on the other? When we consider the simplicity of the cellular
form, the structural symmetry, the infinitesimal size, the outer
uniformity in character and behaviour in the mass or multitude,
do we not find the unmistakable characteristics and habits of the
granular formations ? In other words, we are still on that first rung
of life, if not at the heart of ' matter ', at least fully on its border.

Without exaggeration it may be said that just as man, seen in
terms of palaeontology, merges anatomically with the mass of

81

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

mammals that preceded him, so, probing backwards, we sec the cell
merging qualitatively and quantitatively with the world of
chemical structures. Followed in a backward direction, it visibly
converges towards the molecule.

This is already somediing more than a simple intellectual
intuition.

Only a few years ago what I have just said concerning the
gradual conversion of the ' granule ' of matter into the ' granule '
of life might have been thought of as being as suggestive, but at
the same time as unfounded, as the first dissertations of Darwin or
Lamarck on evolution. But things are now changing. Since the
days of Darwin and Lamarck, numerous discoveries have estab-
lished the existence of the transitional forms postulated by the
theory of evolution. At the same time the latest advances in bio-
chemistry arc beginning to establish the reality of molecular
aggregates which really do appear to reduce to measurable
proportions the gaping void hitherto supposed to exist between
protoplasm and mineral matter. If certain calculations (admittedly
indirect) are accepted as correct, the molecular weights of some
of the natural proteinous substances (such as the viruses so
mysteriously associated with the zymotic diseases in plants and
animals) may well be in terms of millions. Much smaller than any
bacteria — so small in fact that no filter can retain them — the
particles forming these substances are none the less colossal
compared with the molecules normally dealt with in organic
chemistry. It is fruitful to note that if we cannot yet consider
them cells, some of their properties (particularly their faculty of
multiplying in contact with living tissue) detinitely foreshadow
those of proper organic beings. 1

Thanks to the discovery of these giant corpuscles the foreseen

1 Since the viruses have now become visible under the powerful magnifica-
tion of the electron microscope in the form of fine rods asymmetrically active
at their two extremities, the opinion has gained ground that we should include
them among bacteria rather than among ' molecules '. But then, surely, the
study of enzymes and other complex chemical substances is beginning to
reveal that molecules have zjorm and even a great variety of forms.

82

THE ADVENT OF LIFE

existence of intermediate states between the microscopic living
world and the ultra-microscopic ' inanimate ' one has now passed
into the field of direct experimentation.

So from now on we are justified not only by our intellectual
need of continuity but by positive indications when we state that,
in accordance with our theoretical anticipation of the reality of a
pre-life, some natural function really does link the mega-mole-
cular to the micro-organic both in the sequence of their appear-
ance and in their present existence.

And this preliminary finding takes us another step towards a
better understanding of the preparations for, and hence the origins
of, life.

B. A Forgotten Era

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the
well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics. But, as a
naturalist, I am obliged to recognise that the assumption of a
dimensional milieu in which space and time are organically com-
bined is the only way we have found to explain the distribution
around us of animate and inanimate substances. Indeed the further
we advance in our knowledge of the natural history of the world,
the more clearly we realise that the distribution of objects and
forms at any given moment can only be explained by a process
whose duration in time varies directly with the spatial (or morpho-
logical) dispersion of the objects in question. Every distance in
space, every morphological deviation, presupposes and expresses
a duration.

Let us take the very simple case of existing vertebrates. In
the time of Linnaeus the classification of these animals had advanced
sufficiently for them to be arranged in a definite structure of
orders, families, genera etc. Yet the naturalists of the day were
unable to provide any scientific explanation of this system. Wc
know now that the system of Linnaeus merely represents a
present-day cross-section of a diverging bundle of phyla 1 emerging

1 [Throughout this work, the author uses the word phylum in its looser
sense for a zoological branch regardless of dimension.]

83

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

one after the other through the centuries. 1 Accordingly the
zoological separation of living creatures into different types
reveals and measures in each case a difference in age. In the
constellation of species, everything which exists and the place
which it occupies implies a certain past, a certain genesis. In
particular every time the zoologist meets a more primitive type
than those he is familiar with (take the amphioxus, for example)
the result is not merely to extend by one more unit the range of
animal forms: no, a discovery of that sort ipso facto implies
another stage, verticil, or ring on the tree-trunk of evolution. For
the amphioxus we can only find a place in the present animal
kingdom by supposing a whole ' proto-vertcbrate ' stage of life
in the past, coming somewhere beneath the fishes.

In the biologist's space-time, the introduction of a new morpho-
logical end-form or stage needs immediately to be translated by a
correlative prolongation of the axis of duration.

Keeping this principle in mind, let us return to these astonish-
ing giant molecules detected by recent science.

It is possible, though unlikely, that these enormous particles
form in nature today no more than an exceptional and relatively
restricted group. But however rare they may be, and however
modified by secondary association with the living tissue they
batten on parasitically, we have no right whatever to treat them
as monstrosities or aberrant forms. On the contrary, everything
points to their being representative forms, even if only as a
surviving residue of some particular stage in the construction
of terrestrial matter.

Thus, between our cellular zone and our molecular zone,
hitherto supposed adjacent, another, the mega-molecular zone,
has now insinuated itself. And at the same time, because of the
close relation we have established between space and duration,
an additional period must accordingly be inserted at some point
far behind us in the history of the earth. Another circle on the
trunk of the tree means another interval of time in the life of the

1 Sec what I have to say on this subject in the next chapter, section 3, The
Tree of Life.

84

THE ADVENT OP LIFE

universe. The discovery of viruses and other similar elements not
only adds another and important term to our series of states and
forms of matter; it obliges us to interpolate a hitherto forgotten
era (an era of sub-life) in the series of ages that measure the past
of our planet.

Accordingly, working down from incipient life, we find
once again in a clearly defined terminal form that phase and that
aspect of the early earth which we were led to suppose earlier on
when we were climbing the ladder of multiple elements.

Naturally we are not yet in a position to say anything definite
concerning the length of time required for the establishment of
the mega-molecular world. But though we cannot put it into
figures, there are nevertheless some considerations to help us to
form an idea of its order of magnitude. Here are three reasons
among others for believing the process to have been one of the
utmost slowness.

In the first place ; its appearance and development must have
been narrowly dependent on the transformation of the general
conditions, chemical and thermal, prevailing on the surface of the
planet. In contrast to life, which seems to have spread with an
inherent speed in practically stable material surroundings, the
mega-moleculcs must have developed according to the earth's
sidereal rhythm, i.e. incredibly slowly.

Secondly, the transformation, once begun, must have extended
to a mass of matter sufficiently important and sufficiently large
to constitute a zone or envelope of telluric dimensions before it
could form the necessary basis for the emergence of life. That,
too, must have taken a very long time.

Thirdly, mega-molecules seem to show traces of a long
history. How could we possibly imagine them forming suddenly,
like the simpler corpuscles, and remaining so once and for alt?
Their complication and their instability, rather like those of life,
both suggest a long process of gradual accretions over a series of
generations.

For these three reasons, we may now hazard the guess that the
duration required for the formation of proteins on the surface of

85

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

the earth was as long as, perhaps longer than, the whole of geo-
logical time from the Cambrian period to the present day.

And so the abyss of the past is deepened by yet another level
or layer ; and though our incurable intellectual weakness en-
courages us to compress it into an ever thinner slice of duration,
scientific analysis is constantly forcing us to enlarge it.

' This gives us the sort of basis we need for the views which
follow.

Without a long period for maturing no profound change can
take place in nature. On the other hand, granted such a period, it
is inevitable that something quite new should be produced. A
terrestrial era of the mega-molecule is not merely a supplementary
period added to our schedule of durations. For something much
more than that is involved, namely the requirement of a critical
point which concludes and closes it. Which is exactly what
we need to justify the idea that an evolutionary break of the first
order must have taken place with the appearance of the first cells.

But in what way can we envisage the nature of this break ?

c. The Cellular Revolution

a. External Revolution. From an external point of view, which is
the ordinary biological one, the essential originality of the cell
seems to have been the discovery of a new method of agglomera-
ting a larger amount of matter in a single unit. This discovery
was doubdess prepared over a long period by the tentative
gropings in the course of which the mega-molecules gradually
emerged ; but for all that it was sufficiently sudden and revolu-
tionary to have immediately enjoyed prodigious success in the
natural world.

We are still a long way from being able to define die basic
principle of cellular organisation, though it is probably clarity
itself. We have, however, learnt enough to be able to estimate the
extraordinary complexity of its structure and the no less extra-
ordinary fixity of its fundamental type.

86

THE ADVENT OF LIFE

First the complexity. Chemistry teaches us that the cellular
edifice is based on albuminoids, nitrogenous organic substances
(amino acids) of enormous molecular weight (up to 10,000 and
over). In combination with fats, water, phosphorus, and all sorts
of mineral salts (potassium, sodium, magnesium, and various
metallic compounds) these albuminoids constitute a ' proto-
plasm ', a sponge made up of innumerable particles in which
come appreciably into play the forces of viscosity, osmosis, and
catalysis which characterise matter when molecular groupings
have reached an advanced stage. And that is not all. In the centre
of this agglomeration a nucleus containing ' chromosomes ' may
generally be seen against the background of the surrounding
' cytoplasm ', perhaps itself composed of fine rods or filaments
(' mitochondria '). With the increased powers of the microscope
and advances in the use of stains, new structural elements continue
to appear in the complex (whether in height or depth). We find
a triumph of multiplicity organically contained within a mini-
mum of space.

Next the fixity. As we have already pointed out, indefinite
as are the possible modulations of the fundamental theme, in-
exhaustible as are the various forms it assumes in nature, the cell
remains in all cases essentially true to itself. Looking at it, we
hesitate to compare it to anything either in the world of the
' animates ' or that of die ' inanimates '. Yet cells still seem to
resemble one another more as molecules do than as animals do.
We are right to look on them as the first of living forms. But are
we not equally entided to view diem as the representatives of
another state of matter, something as original in its way as the
electronic, the atomic, the crystalline, or the polymerous ? As a
new type of material for a new stage of the universe ?

In this cell (at the same time so single, so uniform and so
complex) what we have is really the stuff of the universe re-
appearing once again with all its characteristics — only this time
it has reached a higher rung of complexity and thus, by the same
stroke (if our hypothesis be well founded), advanced still further
in inferiority, i.e. in consciousness.

87

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

b. Internal Revolution. It is generally accepted that we must
assume psychic life to ' begin ' in the world with the first appear-
ance of organised life, in other words, of the cell. I am thus at one
with current views and ways of stating them when I assume a
decisive step in the progress of consciousness on earth to have
taken place at this particular stage of evolution.

But since I have admitted a much earlier origin (a primordial
one in fact) to the first lineaments of immanence within matter,
it is incumbent on me to explain in what specific way the internal
(' radial ') energy is modified to correspond with the external
(' tangential ') constitution of the cellular unit. If we have
already endowed the long chain of atoms, then molecules, then
mega-molecules, with the obscure and remote sources of a rudi-
mentary free activity, it is not by a totally new beginning but by a
metamorphosis that the cellular revolution should express itself
psychically. But how ? How are we to envisage the change-over
(how are wc even to find room for a change-over) from the pre-
consciousness inherent in pre-life to the consciousness, however
elementary, of the first true living creature ? Are there several
ways for a creature to have a within ?

It is not easy, I must confess, to be clear on this point. Later on,
in the case of thought, a psychical definition of the ' human
critical point ' will emerge almost at once, because the direshold
of reflection bears in itself something definitive and also because
we have only to consult our own deeper selves to measure it. If,
on the other hand, we wish to compare the cell with its pre-
decessors, introspection can only help us through repeated and
remote analogies. What do we know of the ' souls ' of animals,
even of those nearest to ourselves ? At such distances downward
and backward we must resign ourselves to being vague in our
speculations.

At grips with this obscurity and marginal approximation, wc
are nevertheless able to make at least three possible observations —
which are enough to fix in a useful and coherent way the position
of the cellular awakening in the series of psychical transformations
preparing the advent on earth of the phenomenon of man.

88

THE ADVENT OF LIFE

Even if we accept that a sort of rudimentary consciousness
precedes the emergence of life, especially if we accept it, such an
awakening or jump (i) could, or, better, (ii) was bound to, happen,
and hence (iii) we have a partial explanation for one of the most
extraordinary renewals which the face of the earth has under-
gone historically.

In the first place it is quite conceivable that an essential change-
over between two states or forms of consciousness, even on the
lower levels, can happen. To return to and change round in its
very terms the doubt formulated above, I would say there were a
good many ways for a being to have a ' within '. A closed surface,
irregular at first, may become centred. A circle can augment its
order of symmetry and become a sphere. Either by arrangement
of the parts or by the acquisition of another dimension, the degree
of interiority ' of a cosmic element can undoubtedly vary to the
point at which it rises suddenly on to another level.

Now that precisely such a psychic mutation must have
accompanied the discovery of cellular combination follows
directly from the law accepted above as regulating the mutual
relations of the within and the without of things. The increase of
the synthetic state of matter involves, we said, a corresponding
increase of consciousness for the milieu synthesiscd. To which we
should now add : the critical change in the intimate arrangement
of the elements induces ipso facto a change of nature in the state of
consciousness of the particles of the universe.

And now, in the light of these principles, let us look once
again at the astounding spectacle displayed by the definitive
budding of life on the surface of the early earth ; at the thrust
forward in spontaneity ; at the luxuriant unleashing of fanciful
creations ; at the unbridled expansion and the leap into the im-
probable. Surely the explosion of internal energy consequent upon
and proportioned to a fundamental super-organisation of matter is
precisely the event which our theory could have led us to expect.

Such an external realisation of an essentially new type of
corpuscular grouping, allowing the more supple and better
centred organisation of an unlimited number of substances at all

89

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

and, simultaneously, the internal onset of a new type of conscious
activity and determination : this double and radical metamor-
phosis allows us reasonably to define, in regard to what is speci-
fically original in it, the critical passage from the molecule to the
cell — the transit to life.

Before considering the subsequent evolutionary consequences
of this transit, we must look a little closer into the conditions of
its historical realisation— firsdy in space, and secondly in time.

That is the object of the two sections which follow.

2. THE INITIAL MANIFESTATIONS OF LIFE

Because the apparition of the cell was an event which took place
on the frontiers of the infinitesimal, and because the elements
involved were delicate in the extreme, now absorbed in sediments
transformed long ago, there is no chance, as I have said already, of
our ever finding traces of it. Thus at the outset we come up
against that fundamental condition to which experience is subject,
by virtue of which the beginnings of all things tend to be mater-
ially out of our grasp. This is a law running right through history
which we shall later be calling the ' automatic suppression of
evolutionary peduncles '.

Fortunately there are a number of different ways in which our
minds can reach reality. What escapes the intuition of our senses
we can encircle and define approximately by a series of indirect
attacks. Let us follow this more roundabout method, the only one
at our disposal when we try to picture new-born life. We can do
so by stages in the following manner.

a. The Milieu

Wc must start by going back perhaps a thousand million years
and wipe out the greater part of those material superstructures
which form the features of the earth's surface today. Geologists

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THE ADVENT OF LIFE

are far from being agreed upon what our planet looked like at
that distant period. I am inclined myself to picture it as enveloped
in a shoreless ocean (of which the Pacific is perhaps a vestige)
through which, at a few isolated points, protuberances of future
continents had begun to emerge by volcanic eruption. Those
waters were doubtless warmer than our seas today and also more
fraught with free valencies that succeeding ages were gradually
to absorb and stabilise. It was in such a liquid, heavy and active
— at all events it was inevitably in a liquid environment—
that the first cells must have formed. Let us try to distinguish
them.

At this distance of time their form can only be vaguely sur-
mised. By analogy with what we must assume to be their least
altered traces today, the best we can do is to imagine this prim-
ordial generation in terms of granules of protoplasm, with or
without an individually differentiated nucleus. But if the outline
and individual structure remain inscrutable, certain characteristics
of another order stand out sharply and lose none of their value
because they are quantitative. I am referring to their incredible
smallness and — natural consequence — their bewildering number.

B. Smallness and Number

Having reached this point we must force ourselves to make one of
those ' efforts to see ' that I mentioned in my Foreword. We can
look at the night sky year in year out without ever once making a
real effort to apprehend the distances and thus the vast size of the
sidereal masses. Similarly our eyes may be familiar with the field
of vision of a microscope without our ever ' realising ' the dis-
concerting dimensional hiatus which separates the world of man-
kind from that of a drop of water. We can speak with accuracy
about creatures measurable in hundredths of a millimetre, but
have we ever attempted to transplant them mentally seeing them
on their own scale in our framework ? Yet this effort at per-
spective is indispensable if we wish to probe the secrets or even

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

the * space ' of nascent life which can of course be nothing else
than a granular life.

That the first cells were infinitesimal there can be no doubt.
That is determined by their originating out of mega-molecules.
It is also established visually when we examine the simplest forms
of life that we can find still today in the world. When we finally
lose sight of bacteria they are no more than one five-thousandth
of a millimetre long.

And there seems positively to be in the universe a natural
relationship between size and number. Either because they are
faced with a relatively greater space or else to compensate for
their reduced effective radius of individual action, the smaller
creatures are the more they swarm. Measurable only in terms
of microns, the first cells must have been numbered by the myriad.
Hence as we get as near as we can to the threshold of life, it
manifests itself to us simultaneously as microscopic and innumerable.

There is nothing in this which should surprise us. Surely it is
natural that life, as it just emerges from matter, should be ' drip-
ping with molecularity \

What we need now is to understand how the organic world
works and what is its future. On the bottom rung of that ladder
we find number, an immense number. How are we to picture
the historical modalities and the evolutive structure of this native
multiplicity ?

c. The Origin of Number

From our remote standpoint it may be said that life no sooner
started than it swarmed.

To explain and make clear the nature of this multiplicity from
the very beginning of animate evolution, two lines of thought
suggest themselves.

First of all we can assume that, though they only occurred in
the first instance at a single point or a small number of points, the
first cells multiplied almost instantaneously— as crystallisation

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THE ADVENT OF LIFE

spreads in a super-saturated solution. For surely the early earth
was in a state of biological super-tension.

Or, on the other hand, we can equally well suppose that the
passage from mega-molecule to cell took place simultaneously
at a great many points, the requisite conditions of instability being
widespread. Just as, in the case of mankind, great discoveries are
often simultaneous.

Was the origin of cells ' monophyletic ' or ' polyphyletic ' ?
Was this advance in the first instance simple and narrow but
broadening outwards with extreme rapidity, or on the contrary
relatively broad and complex from the first and subsequently
spreading more slowly ? Which is the most suitable way of
imagining the beginnings of the bundle of living beings ?

All through the story of the organisms, at the start of each
zoological group, we meet the same problem — single thread or
multiple strand ? And just because the beginnings are always
beyond the reach of direct vision, we constandy face the same
difficulty of choosing between two hypotheses which are almost
equally plausible. This hesitation worries and irritates us.

But do we really need to choose — here at any rate ? However
slender we may suppose it, the initial peduncle of terrestrial life
must have contained an appreciable number of fibres rooted in the
enormity of the molecular world. Conversely, however broad
we imagine its section, it must, like all nascent physical realities,
have enjoyed an exceptional aptitude to branch out into new
forms. Fundamentally the two perspectives differ only in the
relative importance attributed to one or other of the two factors
(initial complexity and ' expansiveness ') present in both cases.
Both, moreover, imply a close relationship of an evolutive kind
between the first living objects on the early earth. So, ignoring
their secondary conflicts, let us concentrate on the essential fact
on which they both cast light. This, in my opinion, may be
expressed as follows :

From whatever angle we look at it, the nascent cellular world
shows itself to be already infinitely complex. Either on account
of its multiple origin, or because of its rapid variegation from a

93

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

very few points of emergence, or again, we must add, because of
regional differences (climatic or chemical) in the earth's watery
envelope, we are led to envisage life on the protocellular level as
an enormous bundle of polymorphous fibres. Already and even
at these depths the phenomenon of life cannot be really under-
stood except as an organic problem of masses in movement.

An organic problem of masses or multitudes and not a simple
statistical problem of large numbers : what does that difference
imply ?

D. Inter-relationship and Shape

Once more, but now on the collective scale, we arc faced with the
frontier between the physical and the biological worlds. As
long as wc were dealing with churning atoms or molecules we
could be content with the numerical laws of probability when
working out the behaviour of matter. But from the moment
when the monad acquires the dimensions and superior spontaneity
of a cell, and tends to be individualised at the heart of a pleiad, a
more complicated pattern appears in the stuff of the universe.
On two counts at least it would be inadequate and false to imagine
life, even taken in its granular stage, as a fortuitous and amorphous
proliferation.

Firstly the initial mass of the cells must from the start have
been inwardly subjected to a sort of inter-dependence which went
beyond a mere mechanical adjustment, and was already a begin-
ning of ' symbiosis ' or life-in-common.

However tenuous it was, the first veil of organised matter
spread over the earth could neither have established nor main-
tained itself without some network of influences and exchanges
which made it a biologically cohesive whole. From its origin, the
cellular nebula necessarily represented, despite its internal multi-
plicity, a sort of diffuse super-organism. Not merely a foam of
lives but, to a certain extent, itself a living film. A simple re-
appearance, after all, in more advanced form and on a higher
level of those much older conditions which we have already seen

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THE ADVENT OF LIFE

presiding over the birth and equilibrium of the first polymerised,
substances on the surface of the early earth. A simple prelude
too, to the much more advanced evolutionary solidarity, so
marked in the higher forms of life, whose existence obliges us
increasingly to admit the strictly organic nature of the links
which unite them in a single whole at the heart of the biosphere.
Secondly (and this is more surprising) the innumerable
elements composing at the outset the living film of the earth do
not seem to have been taken or collected exhaustively and hap-
hazard. Their admission into this primordial envelope gives
rather the impression of having been mysteriously guided by a
previous selection or dichotomy. Biologists have noted that,
according to the chemical group to which they belong, the mole-
cules incorporated into living matter are all asymmetrical in the
same way, that is to say if a pencil of polarised light is passed
through them they all turn the plane of the beam in the same
direction — either they are all right-rotating or all left-rotating
according to the group taken. More remarkable still, all living
creatures, from the humblest bacteria to man, contain exactly the
same complicated types of vitamins and enzymes, notwithstand-
ing the great range of chemical forms possible; just as the higher
mammals are all ' tritubercular ' and walking vertebrates all four-
footed. Surely such similarity of living substance in dispositions
which do not seem necessary suggests an early choice or sorting.
This chemical uniformity of protoplasm at accidental points has
been taken as proof that all existing organisms descend from a
single ancestral group (the case of the crystal falling in the super-
saturated solution). Without going as far as that, we may say
that all it establishes is a certain initial cleavage (between right-
rotating and left-rotating examples, for instance, whichever it
may be) in the enormous mass of carbon matter at the threshold
of life (instance of the discovery in n points at once). In any event,
it is not important. The interesting thing is that on cither assump-
tion the living world assumes the same curious appearance of a
totality re-formed from a partial group : whatever may have
been the complexity of its original impetus, it exhausts only a

95

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

part of what might have been. Taken as a whole, the biosphere
would thus represent only a simple branch within and above other
less progressive or less fortunate proliferations of pre-life. And
surely this amounts to saying that, considered globally, the appear-
ance of the first cells gives rise to the same problems as do the
origins of each of those later stems we call ' phyla '. The universe
had already begun to ramify and it doubtless goes on ramifying
indefinitely, even below the tree of life.

Seen from afar, elementary life looks like a variegated multi-
tude of microscopic elements, a multitude great enough to envelop
the earth, yet at the same time sufficiently interrelated and
selected to form a structural whole of genetic solidarity.

These remarks, let it be said again, are only valid for the
general features and characters taken as a whole. That is what
should have been expected and we must be resigned to it. Follow-
ing all the dimensions of the universe one same law of perspective
inevitably blurs, in the field of our vision, the abysses of the past
and the distant backgrounds of space : what is very far and very
small loses its outline. For us to probe further into the phenomena
accompanying its origin, it would be necessary for life— some-
where or other on the earth— to be still generating today under

our eyes.

That chance— and here is my last point under this heading —
is precisely the one we are not given. 1

3. THE SEASON OF LIFE

It would be quite conceivable a priori that the mysterious trans-
formation of mega-molecules into cells, accomplished millions
of years ago, might still, unnoticed, be going on around us at the
extreme limits of the microscopic and the inhnitesimal. There are
many forces in nature that we have supposed exhausted only to
find, on closer analysis, that they are still flourishing. The earth's

1 Unless of course (ind who can tell ?) chemists succeed in reproducing
the phenomenon in the laboratory.

9<5

THE ADVENT OF LIFE

crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet.
Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites
are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic
world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless
branches. If movement can be concealed by extreme slowness,
why should not extreme smallness have the same effect ? Indeed
there is nothing inherently impossible about the continued birth
today of living substance on an inhnitesimal scale.

In fact, however, nothing indicates this to be the case. On the
contrary, everything points the other way.

We all know of the famous controversy of nearly a hundred
years ago between the partisans and the adversaries of ' spon-
taneous generation ' . . It would appear that too much was made
at the time of the results of the battle, as though Pouchet's defeat
closed the door on any scientific hope of giving an evolutionary
explanation to the first origins of life. But today we are all agreed
on one point. From the fact diat, in the laboratory, life never
appears in a medium from which all germs have previously been
eliminated, it would be a mistake to deduce (in the face of all
manner of general evidence) that the phenomenon may not have
happened under other conditions in other ages. Pasteur's experi-
ments could not and cannot now in any way disprove the birth
of cells on our planet in the past. But their success, proved over
and over again by the universal adoption of methods of sterilisa-
tion, seems to have really established one thing: that within the
field and limits of what we can investigate, protoplasm is no
longer formed directly from the inorganic substances of the earth. 1

This obliges us at the outset to revise certain over-absolute
ideas we may have harboured concerning the use and value in
our sciences of explanations ' in terms of present causes '.

1 Against Pasteur's experiments it may be objected that sterilisation is so
brutal as to be capable of destroying not only the living germs, whose elimina-
tion is desired, but also those ' pre-living ' germs from which alone life might
emerge. However that may be, the most convincing proof to me that life was
produced once and once only on earth is furnished by the profound structural
unity of the tree of life (see below).

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

A moment ago I reminded the reader that many terrestrial
transformations which we could have sworn had stopped, and
stopped ages ago, are still going on in the world around us. Under
the influence of this unexpected observation which pampers our
natural preference for palpable and manageable forms of experi-
ence, our minds are inclined to slide gently into die belief that
there never was in the past or will be in the future anything new
under the sun. And it would only be one step farther to limit
full and real knowledge to the events of the present. Funda-
mentally, is not everything, apart from the present, mere ' con-
jecture ' ?

We must at all costs resist this instinctive limitation of the
rights and scope of science.

No. The world would not fully satisfy the conditions imposed
by actuality — it would not be the great world of mechanics and
biology — if we were lost in it like ephemeral insects which are
unaware of all save their brief season. So vast are the dimensions
of the universe disclosed by the present that, for this reason alone,
all sorts of things must have happened in it before man was there
to witness them. Long before the awakening of thought on earth,
manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which
have no parallel today. Thus, besides the group of pheno-
mena subject to direct observation, there is for science a particular
class of facts to be considered — specifically the most important
because the rarest and most significant — those which depend
neither on direct observation nor experiment, but can only be
brought to light by a very authentic branch of ' physics ', the
discovery of the past. And, to judge by our repeated failures to find
its equivalent around us or to reproduce it, the first apparition of
living bodies is clearly one of the most sensational of these events.
With that, let us advance a step. There are two possible ways
in which something can fail to coincide, in time, with our power
of seeing. One is for it to happen at such distant intervals that the
whole of our existence can run its course between two successive
occurrences. The other, by which we miss it still more inevitably,
is for it to have happened once and never be repeated. In other

98

THE ADVENT OF LIFE

words, either a recurrent phenomenon of very infrequent
periodicity (such as we meet so often in astronomy) or one
strictly unique (as with Socrates or Augustus in human history).
In which of these two ' inexperi mental ' or rather ' praeter-
experimental ' categories do we find it most suitable, in the light
of Pasteur's discoveries, to put the birth of life, the initial forma-
tion of cells from matter ?

There is no lack of facts to support the idea that organised
matter might germinate periodically on the earth. Later on,
when I come to outline the ' tree of life ', I shall be calling atten-
tion to the coexistence in the living world of certain large
aggregates (protozoa, plants, hydrozoa, insects, vertebrates) whose
lack of basic relationship might be fairly satisfactorily explained
in terms of heterogenous origins. Something like those succes-
sive intrusions going back to different ages originating from the
same magma, whose interlacing veins form the eruptive complex
of a single identical mountain . . . the hypodiesis of independent
vital pulsations would conveniently account for the morpho-
logical diversity of the principal sub-kingdoms recognised by
systematic biology. Moreover, there is no difficulty on the
chronological side. In any case the length of time separating the
historical origins of two successive sub-kingdoms is much greater
than the age of mankind. So it is not astonislung that we should
live in the illusion that nothing happens any more. Matter seems
dead. But could not the next pulsation be slowly preparing
around us ?

I feel bound to point out and even, to a certain extent, to
defend the conception of a spasmodic genesis of life. Yet I cannot
actually adopt it. For there is one decisive objection against the
idea of a number of different, successive, vital thrusts on the
earth's surface — namely the fundamental similarity of all organic
beings.

We have already called attention in this chapter to the curious
fact that all molecules of living substances are asymmetrical in the
same way, and contain precisely the same vitamins. Now, the
more complex organisms become, die more evident becomes

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

their inherent kinship. It manifests itself in the absolute and
universal uniformity of the basic cellular pattern, and it manifests
itself, particularly in animals, in the identical solutions found for
various problems of perception, nutrition and reproduction —
everywhere we find vascular and nervous systems, everywhere
some form of blood, everywhere gonads and everywhere eyes.
It continues in the similarity of the methods employed by units
for collecting together in higher organisms and becoming
' socialised ', and finally it shines clearly in the general laws of
development (' ontogenesis ' and ' phylogenesis ') which give to
the living world, considered as a whole, the coherence of a single
upthrust.

Though one or the other of these many analogies might be
explained by the adjustment of one and the same ' pre-living
magma ' under identical terrestrial conditions, it would neverthe-
less seem impossible to regard their unified complex as the result
of a simple parallelism or a simple ' convergence '. Even if there
were only one solution to the main physical and physiological
problem of life on earth, that general solution would necessarily
leave undecided a host of accidental and particular questions, and
it does not seem thinkable that they would have been decided
twice in the same way. And it is precisely in these ancillary modali-
ties that living creatures resemble each other, even those belong-
ing to very different groups. Accordingly the contrasts presented
today by zoological phyla lose much of their importance (are
they not simply effects of perspective combined with a progressive
isolation ot existing phyla ?), and naturalists are becoming more
and more convinced that the genesis of life on earth belongs to
the category of absolutely unique events that, once happened, are
never repeated. This is a much more credible hypothesis than
would appear at first sight, if we succeed in forming a tenable
idea of what is hidden in the history of our planet.

It is fashionable nowadays in geology and geophysics to
attach a preponderant importance to periodical phenomena.
Seas advance and recede ; continental platforms rise and sink ;
mountains are lifted and levelled ; glaciadons advance and retire;

ioo

THE ADVENT OF LIFE

radio-active warmth accumulates in the depths then overflows
on die surface. We hear of nothing save this majestic ' ebb and
flow ' in treatises dealing with the vicissitudes of the earth.

This predilection for what is rhythmic in events goes hand
in hand with a preference for the ' actual ' in causes, and both
alike are explained by precise rational needs. Whatever repeats
itself is, at all events potentially, observable, and can be made
subject to a law. It provides a scale on which we can measure
time. I am the first to acknowledge the scientific quality of these
advantages, yet I cannot help thinking that an exclusive analysis
of the oscillations recorded by the earth's crust or the movements
of life would omit from the inquiry what is the principal aim of
geology.

For the earth is after all something more than a sort of huge
breadiing body. Admittedly it rises and falls, but more important
is the fact that it must have begun at a certain moment ; that it
is passing through a consecutive series of moving equilibria ;
and that in all probability it is tending towards some final state.
It has a birth, a development, and presumably a death ahead.
Thus all around us, deeper than any pulsation that could be
expressed in geological eras, we must suppose there to be a total
process which is not of a periodic character defining the total
evolution of the planet; something more complicated chemicaJJy
and deeper within matter than the ' cooling ' of which we used
to hear so much ; yet something both continuous and irre-
versible. An ever-ascending curve, the points of transformation
of which are never repeated ; a constantly rising tide below the
rhythmic tides of the ages — it is on this essential curve, it is in
relation to this advancing level of the waters, that the phenomenon
of life, as I see things, must be situated.

If life, one day, was able to ' isolate ' itself in the primitive
ocean, it was no doubt because the complexity of die earth's
elements and their distribution had reached the general privileged
condition which permitted and favoured the building of proto-
plasms (which is what we mean by the earth being ' young ').

And if thereafter life has never again been formed directly

101

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

from the elements of the lithosphere or hydrosphere, this is
apparently because the very emergence of a biosphere so dis-
turbed, impoverished and relaxed the primordial chemism of
our fragment of the universe that the phenomenon can never be
repeated (unless perhaps artificially).

From this point of view — and it seems to me the right one —
the ' cellular revolution ' would now be seen as a critical singular
point, an unparalleled moment on the curve of telluric evolution,
the point o( germination. Protoplasm was formed once and once
only on earth, just as nuclei and electrons were formed once and
once only in the cosmos.

This hypothesis has the advantage of providing a reason for
the deep organic likeness which stamps all living creatures from
bacteria to mankind. At the same time it explains why we never
at any point find the formation of the least living thing wkich is
not there as the result of generation. And that was the problem.

But this hypothesis has two other notable consequences for
science.

Firstly, by separating the phenomenon of life from the
numerous other periodical and secondary events on earth, and by
making it one of the principal landmarks (or parameters) of the
sidereal evolution of the globe, it rectifies our sense of proportion
and of values and hence renews our perspective of the world.

Secondly, by the very fact of showing that the origin of
organised bodies is linked with a chemical transformation un-
precedented and unrepeated in the history of the world, the
hypothesis inclines us to think of the energy contained in the
living layer of our planet as developing from and within a sort
of closed ' quantum ', defined by the amplitude of this primordial
emission.

Life was born and propagates itself on the earth as a solitary
pulsation.

It is the propagation of that unique wave that we must now
follow, right up to man and if possible beyond him.

102

CHAPTER TWO

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

When a physicist wants to study the development of a wave, he
begins by calculating the pulsation of a single particle. Then he
reduces the vibrating medium to its main characteristics and
directions of elasticity, and generalises the results found in the
instance of the element. He thus obtains an overall picture as
close as possible to the movement of the whole he is trying to
determine.

When he faces the task of describing the ascent of life, the
biologist is obliged to follow a similar method in his own special
way. It is impossible to reduce tins enormous and complex
phenomenon to order without first analysing the processes dis-
covered by life for its advance in each of its elements taken in
isolation. It is equally impossible to distinguish the general
behaviour adopted by the total multitude of individual pro-
gressions without choosing the most expressive and luminous
features of their resultant effect.

In the pages that follow I intend to develop a simplified but
structural representation of life evolving on earth ; a vision so
homogeneous and coherent that its truth is irresistible. I provide
no minor details and no arguments, but only a perspective that
the reader may sec and accept — or not see.

The gist of what I mean comes under these three headings :

1. The elemental movements of life,

2. The spontaneous ramification of the living mass,

3. The tree of life.

All this will first be studied at the surface and from without. We

103

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

shall only start probing into the within of tilings in the subsequent
chapter.

i. THE ELEMENTAL MOVEMENTS OF LIFE

A. Reproduction

At the base of the entire process whereby the envelope of the
biosphere spreads its web over the face of the earth stands the
meclianism of reproduction which is typical of life. Sooner or
later each cell divides (by mitotic, or amitotic division) and gives
birth to another cell similar to itself. First, a single centre ; then
two. Everything in the subsequent development of life stems
from this potent primordial phenomenon.

In itself, cell division seems to be due to the simple need of
the living particle to find a remedy for its molecular fragility
and for the structural difficulties involved in continued growth.
The process is one of rejuvenation and shedding. The more
limited groups of atoms, the micro-molecules, have an almost
indefinite longevity, and with it an equivalent rigidity. The cell,
continually in the toils of assimilation, must split in two to con-
tinue to exist. At first sight reproduction appears as a simple
process thought up by nature to ensure the permanence of the
unstable in the case of these vast molecular edifices.

But, as always happens in die world, what was at first a happy
accident or means of survival, is promptly transformed and used
as an instrument of progress and conquest. Life at fust seems to
have reproduced itself only in self-defence ; but this was a mere
prelude to its vast conquests.

B. Multiplication

For, once introduced into the stuff of the universe, the principle
of the duplication of living particles knows no limits other than
those of the quantity of matter provided. It has been calculated

104

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

that, in a few generations, a single infusorian could by simple
division of itself and its descendants cover the whole surface of
the earth. Every volume, however great, succumbs to the effects
of geometrical progression, and this is not a pure extrapolation
of the mind. In its ability to double itself and to go on doubling
itself without let or hindrance, life possesses a force of expansion
as invincible as that of a body that dilates or vaporises. But
whereas in the case of so-called inert matter the increase in
volume soon reaches a point of equilibrium, no such limit appears
to be set to the expansion of living substance. The more the
phenomenon of cellular division spreads, the more it gains in
virulence. Once fission has started, nothing from within can
arrest its devouring and creative conflagration, because it is
spontaneous. Nor is there any external influence powerful
enough to check, the process.

c. Renovation

Yet this is only the first result and only the quantitative side of
the process. Reproduction doubles the mother cell. Thus, by a
mechanism which is the inverse of chemical disintegration, it
multiplies without crumbling. At the same time, however, it trans-
forms what was only intended to be prolonged. Closed in on
itself, the living clement reaches more or less quickly a state of
immobility. It becomes stuck and coagulated in its evolution.
Then by the act of reproduction it regains the faculty for inner
re-adjustment and consequendy takes on a new appearance and
direction. The process is one of pluralisation in form as well as in
number. The elemental ripple of life that emerges from each
individual unit does not spread outwards in a monotonous circle
formed of individual units exactly like itself. It is diffracted and
becomes iridescent, with an indefinite scale of variegated tonal-
ides. The living unit is a centre of irresistible multiplication, and
ipso facto an equally irresistible focus of diversification.

105

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

D. Conjugation

And then, so it seems, so as to enlarge the breach thus made by
its first inroads in the ramparts of the unorganised world, life
discovered the wonderful process of conjugation. It would take
a whole book to describe and extol the growth and sublimation
of sexual dualism in the course of evolution from the cell to man.
At the early stages that we are now considering, the phenomenon
appears in the main as a means of accelerating and intensifying
the double effect (multiplication and diversification) obtained by
asexual reproduction such as is still prevalent in many of the lower
organisms and even with the individual cells of our own bodies.
By the first conjugation of two elements, however little they
may as yet have been differentiated into male and female, the door
was thrown open to diose modes of generation whereby a single
individual can pulverise itself into a myriad of germs. Simul-
taneously we find coming into play the endless permutations and
combinations of ' characters ' so dear to modern geneticists.
Instead of simply radiating from each centre in process of division,
the rays of life now anastomose — exchanging and varying their
respective riches. We no more dream of being astonished at this
prodigious invention than at the discoveries of fire, bread or
writing. Yet what chances and what fumblings — and what
endless ages therefore — were necessary before this fundamental
discovery from which we have sprung was matured. And how
much longer still before it found its complement and natural
fulfdment in the no less revolutionary innovation of association'.

E. Association

In first analysis — and supposing we ignore deeper factors for die
moment — the grouping of living particles into complex organ-
isms is an almost inevitable consequence of their multiplication.
Cells tend to congregate because they press against each other or

106

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

are even born in clusters. But the purely mechanical necessity or
opportunity to get together engendered in the long run a definite
method of biological improvement.

We still seem to be able to see all the stages of this still un-
finished march of nature towards the unification or synthesis of
the ever-increasing products of living reproduction. At the
bottom we find the simple aggregate, as in bacteria and the lower
fungi. One stage higher comes the colony of attached cells, not
yet centralised, though distinct specialisation has begun, as with
the higher vegetable forms and the bryozoa. Higher still is the
metazoan cell of cells, in which by a prodigious critical transforma-
tion an autonomous centre is established (as though by excessive
shrinking) over the organised group of living particles. And still
farther on, to round oft the list, at the present limit of our experi-
ence and of life's experiments, comes society — that mysterious
association of free metazoans in which (with varying success)
the formation of hyper-complex units by ' mega-svnthesis '
seems to be being attempted.

The last part of this book will be particularly devoted to this
last and highest form of aggregation, in which the self-organising
effort of matter culminates perhaps in society as capable of reflec-
tion. Here wc must confine ourselves to pointing out that
association, considered at all its levels, is not a sporadic or acciden-
tal appearance in the animal kingdom. On the contrary, it
represents one of die most universal and constant expedients (and
thus one of the most significant) used by life in its expansion. Two
of its advantages are immediately obvious. Thanks to it, living
substance is able to build itself up in sufficient bulk to escape
innumerable external obstacles (capillary attraction, osmotic
pressure, chemical variation of the medium, etc.) winch paralyse
the microscopic organisms. In biology, as in navigation, a certain
size is physically necessary for certain movements. Thanks to it
again, the organism (here too because of its increased volume) is
able to find room inside itself to lodge the countless mechanisms
added successively in the course of its differentiation.

107

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

F. Controlled Additivity

Reproduction, conjugation, association . . . No matter how far
they are extended, these various activities of the cell in themselves
only lead to a surface deployment of the organisms. If it had been
left to their resources alone, life would have spread and varied,
but always on the same level. It would have been like an aero-
plane which can taxi but not become airborne. It would never
have taken off.

It is at this point that the phenomenon of additivity intervenes
and acts as a vertical component.

There seems to be no lack of examples, in the course of bio-
logical evolution, of transformations acting horizontally by pure
crossing of characters. One example is the mutation we call
Mendelian. But when we look deeper and more generally we
sec that the rejuvenations made possible by each reproduction
achieve something more than mere substitution. They add, one to
the other, and their sum increases in a pre-determined direction.
Dispositions are accentuated, organs are adjusted or supplemented.
We get diversification, the growing specialisation of factors
forming a single genealogical sequence — in other words, the
apparition of the line as a natural unit distinct from the individual.
This law of controlled complication, the mature stage of the pro-
cess in which we get first the micro-molecule then the mega-
molecule and finally the first cells, is known to biologists as
orthogenesis. 1

Orthogenesis is the dynamic and only complete form of
heredity. The word conceals deep and real springs of cosmic
extent. We shall find this out little by litde, but meanwhile one

1 On the pretext of its being used in various questionable or restricted senses,
or of its having a metaphysical flavour, some biologists would like to suppress
the word ' orthogenesis '. But my considered opinion is that the word is
essentia] and indispensable for singling out and affirming the manifest property
of living matter to form a system in which ' terms succeed each other experi-
mentally, following constandy increasing degrees of centro-complexity '.

108

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

point already stands out clearly at the present stage of our inquiry.
Thanks to its characteristic additive power, living matter (unlike
the matter of the physicists) finds itself ' ballasted ' with complica-
tions and instability. It falls, or rather rises, towards forms that
are more and more improbable.

Without orthogenesis life would only have spread ; with it
there is an ascent of life that is invincible.

A Corollary : The Ways of Life

At this point let us pause for a moment. Before we try to see
where these various laws regulating the movements of the isolated
particle lead us, when extended to the whole of life, let us attempt
to distinguish the general lines of behaviour or attitudes which, in
accordance with these elementary laws, characterise life in move-
ment at all levels and in all circumstances.

These attitudes or ways of proceeding can be reduced to three:
profusion, ingenuity and (judged from our individual point of
view) indifference.

a. Let us first consider profusion, which is born of unlimited
multiplication.

Life advances by mass effects, by dint of multitudes flung into
action without apparent plan. Milliards of germs and millions of
adults jostling, shoving and devouring one another, fight
for elbow room and for the best and largest living space. Despite
all the waste and ferocity, all the mystery and scandal it involves,
there is, as we must be fair and admit, a great deal of biological
efficiency in the struggle {or life. In the course of this implacable
contest between masses of living substance in irresistible expan-
sion, the individual unit is undeniably tried to the limits of its
strength and resources. ' Survival of the fittest by natural selec-
tion ' is not a meaningless expression, provided it is not taken to
imply either a final ideal or a final explanation.

But it is not the individual unit that seems to count for most
in the phenomenon. What we find within the struggle to live is

109

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

something deeper than a series of duels ; it is a conflict of chances.
By reckless self-reproduction life takes its precautions against
mishap. It increases its chances of survival and at the same time
multiplies its chances of progress.

Once more, this time on the plane of animate particles, we find
the fundamental technique of groping, the specific and invincible
weapon of all expanding multitudes. This groping strangely
combines the blind fantasy of large numbers with the precise
orientation of a specific target. It would be a mistake to see it as
mere chance. Groping is directed chance. It means pervading
everything so as to try everything, and trying everything so as to
find everything. Surely in the last resort it is precisely to develop
this procedure (always increasing in size and cost in proportion
as it spreads) that nature has had recourse to profusion.
b. Next comes ingenuity. This is the indispensable condition, or
more precisely the constructive facet, of additiviry.

To accumulate characters in stable and coherent aggregates,
life has to be very clever indeed. Not only has it to invent the
machine but, like an engineer, so design it that it occupies the
minimum space and is simple and resilient. And this implies and
involves, as regards the structure of organisms (particularly die
higher ones), a property which must never be forgotten.

What can be put together can be taken apart.

At an early stage of their discoveries biologists were surprised
and fascinated by the fact that living beings, however perfect
(or even more perfect) their spontaneity, were always decom-
posable into an endless chain of dosed mechanisms. From this
they thought they could deduce universal materialism. But they
overlooked the essential difference between a natural whole and
the elements into which it is analysed.

By its very construction, it is true, every organism is always
and inevitably reducible into its component parts. But it by no
means follows that the sum of the parts is the same as the whole,
or that, in the whole, some specifically new value may not
emerge. That what is ' free ', even in man, can be broken down
into determinisms, is no proof that the world is not based on

no

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

freedom — as indeed I maintain that it is. It is simply the result of
ingenuity — a triumph of ingenuity — on the part of life.
c. Lastly, for individual units, comes indifference.

How often have artists, poets and even philosophers depicted
nature as a blind Fury trampling existence in the dust ?

Profusion is the first trace of this apparent brutality : like
Tolstoy's grasshoppers, life passes over a bridge made up of
accumulated corpses, and this is a direct effect of multiplication.
But in the same ' inhuman ' direction orthogenesis and association
also operate, in their fashion.

By the phenomenon of association, the living particle is
wrenched from itself. Caught up in an aggregate greater than
itself, it becomes to some extent its slave. It no longer belongs to
itself.

And what organic or social incorporation does to extend it in
space, its accession to a line of descent achieves no less inexorably
in time. By die force of orthogenesis the individual unit becomes
part of a chain. From being a centre it is changed into being an
intermediary, a link — no longer existing, but transmitting ; and,
as it has been put, life is more real than lives.

On the one hand the individual unit is lost in number, on the
other it is torn apart in the collectivity, and in yet a third direction
it stretches out in becoming. This dramatic and perpetual
opposition between the one born of the many and the many
constantly being born of the one runs right through evolution.

As the general movement of life becomes regular, the conflict,
despite occasional counter-attacks, tends to resolve itself. Yet it
remains painfully noticeable to the end. The antinomy only
clears up with the appearance of mind where it attains its paroxysm
in feeling, and the indifference of the world for its constituents is
transformed into an immense solicitude. This is the sphere of the
person.

But we have not yet come to that point.
Groping profusion ; constructive ingenuity ; indifference
towards whatever is not future and totality ; — these arc the three
headings under which life rises up by virtue of its elementary

in

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

mechanisms. There is also a fourth heading which embraces them
all — that of global unity.

This we have come across already — first in primordial matter,
then on the early earth, then in the genesis of the fust cells. Here
it reappears in a still more emphatic way. Though the prolifera-
tions of living matter are vast and manifold, they never lose their
solidarity. A continuous adjustment co-adapts them from with-
out. A profound equilibrium gives them balance within. Taken
in its totality, the living substance spread over the earth — from
the very first stages of its evolution— traces the lineaments of one
single and gigantic organism.

I repeat this same thing like a refrain on every rung of the
ladder that leads to man ; for, if this thing is forgotten, nothing
can be understood.

To see life properly we must never lose sight of the unity of
the biosphere that lies beyond the plurality and essential rivalry of
individual beings. This unity was still diffuse in the early stages
— a unity in origin, framework and dispersed impetus rather than
in ordered grouping ; yet a unity which, together with life's
ascent, was to grow ever sharper in outline, to fold in upon itself,
and, finally, to centre itself under our eyes.

i. THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THE
LIVING MASS

Now let us study, over the whole extent of the living earth, the
various movements whose aspect we have analysed in the instance
of cells or groups of cells taken in isolation. Seen on such a huge
scale one might well expect the multitude to be entangled in
utter confusion. Or, inversely, we might expect that their total,
in the process of harmonising, should create a continuous wave
like the radiating ripple from a stone in a pool. But what actually
happens is a third alternative. As we see it under our very eyes
today, the ' front ' of advancing life is neither chaotic nor con-
tinuous. It is an aggregate of fragments at one and the same time

112

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

divergent and arranged in tiers — classes, orders, families, genera,
species. In other words what we see is the whole scale of groups
whose variety, order of size and relationships our modern
systematic biology tries to express in names.

Considered as a whole, life's advances go hand in hand with
segmentation. As life expands, it splits spontaneously into large,
natural, hierarchical units. It ramifies. And the moment has come
to study this ramification, a particular phenomenon as essential
to large animate masses as mitotic division was to cells.

A number of different factors contribute to drawing up or
accentuating the branches of life. Again, I shall reduce them to
three : a. Aggregates of growth, giving birth to ' phyla.' b.
Florescence (or disjunctions) of maturity, periodically producing
' verticils '. c. Effects of distance : the elimination (from view)
of the ' peduncles '.

A. Aggregates of Growth

Let us return to the living element in the process of reproduction
and multiplication. From this element, taken as centre, we have
seen different lines radiating orthogenetically, each recognisable
by the accentuation of certain characters. By their construction
these lines diverge and tend to separate. Yet, so far, we have no
reason to suppose that they may not meet with other lines
radiating from neighbouring elements, become enmeshed with
them and so form an impenetrable network.

By ' aggregate of growth ' I mean the new and unexpected
fact that a dispersion oj simple type occurs precisely where the play
of chance would have made us most fear a complicated tangle.
When poured out on the ground, a sheet of water quickly breaks
up into streamlets and then into definite streams. Similarly, under
the influence of various causes (such as the native parallelism of
elementary orthogenesis, the attraction and mutual adjustment of
lines, the selective influence of the environment and so on) the
fibres of a living mass in the process of diversification tend to
draw together, to bind, following a restricted number of domi-

113

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

nant directions. In the beginning this concentration of forms
round a few privileged axes is indistinct and indefinite ; it
involves a mere increase, in certain sectors, of the number or
density of the lines. Then gradually the movement takes shape.
True nervures become visible, though without breaking up the
limb of the leaf in which they appear. At this stage the fibres may
still partially escape from the network which is trying to contain
them. From nervure to nervure, they may still touch one another,
anastomose, or cross one another. The zoologist would say that
the group is still at the racial stage. And at this point there takes
place what may be called the final aggregation or final separation
(according to the point of view we take). For, having reached a
certain degree of mutual cohesion, the lines isolate themselves in a
closed sheaf that can no longer be penetrated by neighbouring
sheaves. From now on, their association, the ' bundle ', will
evolve on its own, autonomously. The species has become
individualised. The phylum has been born.

The phylum. The living ' bundle '; the line of lines. Many
observers still refuse to see or admit the reality of this strand of
life in the process of evolution. They do not know how to see,
how to make the necessary adjustments in their vision.

The phylum is first of all a collective reality. Therefore, to see
it clearly, we need to look from a sufficient height and distance.
Examined too closely, it crumbles into unevenness and confusion.
We fail to see the wood for the trees.

Secondly, the phylum is polymorphous and elastic. Like a
molecule, which ranges through all sizes and degrees of complica-
tion, it can be as small as a single species or as vast as a sub-king-
dom. There are simple phyla and phyla composed of phyla.
Phylctic unity is not so much quantitative as structural ; so we
must be ready to recognise it on every scale of dimension.

Lastly, the phylum has a dynamic nature. It only comes
properly into view at a certain depth of duration, in other words
only in movement. When immobilised in time, it loses its features
and, as it were, its soul. Its morion is killed by a ' still '.

Considered without these provisos, the phylum might well

114

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

be thought to be just one more artificial entity carved for classifica-
tion purposes out of the continuum of life. But looked at in
proper magnification and light, it can be seen to be a perfectly
defined structural reality.

What defines the phylum in the first place is its ' initial angle
of divergence ', that is to say the particular direction in which it
groups itself and evolves as it separates off from neighbouring
forms.

What defines it in the second place is its ' initial section '.
About this point (already touched on when we were considering
the first cells, and which will assume outstanding importance in
the case of man) we are still very much in the dark. But at least
one thing is certain at the outset. Just as it is physically impossible
for a drop of water to condense save at a certain volume — or
again, as it is impossible for a chemical reaction to take place
unless a certain quantity of matter is present — the phylum cannot
establish itself biologically unless, from the start, it has gathered
up in itself a sufficient number and variety of potentialities. The
lack of a certain initial modicum of consistency and richness (or
the failure to break away at a sufficient angle) is enough to prevent
a new branch from attaining individuality. The rule is strict. But
how, in concrete terms, are we to express the ride and visualise
its operation ? — in terms of a diffuse segregation of a mass within
a mass, or as an effect of contagion propagating around a narrowly
limited area of mutation ? What surface representation can we
give to the birth of a species ? We are still hesitant and the
question may perhaps involve a variety of answers. But we have
gone a long way towards solving a problem once we are able to
formulate it.

Lastly what serves not only to define the phylum, but also to
classify it without ambiguity as one of the natural units of the
world, is ' its power and singular law of autonomous develop-
ment '. If wc say that it behaves ' like a living thing ' this is no
mere figure of speech ; in its own way it grows and flourishes.

"5

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

b. The Flourishing oj Maturity

In virtue of analogies which correspond, as we shall discover
later, to a deep bond of nature, the development of a phylum is
strangely parallel to the successive stages undergone by an inven-
tion made by men. We know those stages well from having
seen them for about a century constantly around us. Roughly
the idea first takes the shape of a theory or a provisional mechan-
ism. Then follows a period of rapid modifications. The rough
model is continually touched up and adjusted until it is practically
completed. On the attainment of this stage, the new creation
enters its phase of expansion and equilibrium. As regards quality
it now only undergoes minor changes ; it has reached its ceiling.
But quantitatively it spreads out and reaches full consistence.
It is the same story with all modern inventions, from the bicycle
to the aeroplane, from photography to the cinema and radio.

In just this way the naturalist sees the curve of growth followed
by the branches of life. At the outset the phylum corresponds to
the ' discovery ', by groping, of a new type of organism that is
both viable and advantageous. But this new type will not attain
its most economical or efficient form all at once. For a certain
period of time it devotes all its strength, so to speak, to groping
about within itself. Try-out follows try-out, without being
finally adopted. Then at last perfection comes within sight, and
from that moment the rhythm of change slows down. The new
invention, having reached the limit of its potentialities, enters its
phase of conquest. Stronger now than its less perfected neigh-
bours, the newly bom group spreads and at the same time con-
solidates. It multiplies, but without further diversification. It
has now entered its fully grown period and at the same time its
period of stability.

The flourishing of the phylum by simple dilatation or by the
thickening of the initial stalk — except in the case of a branch that
has reached the limits of its evolutionary power — this elementary
procedure is never completely realised. However decisive and

116

THE EXPANSION OP LIFE

xiumphant the solution brought by the new form to the problems
■aiscd by existence, it still admits of a certain number of variants.
\nd because each of these variants brings its own particular
idvantage, they have no power or reason to eliminate each other.
That explains why, as it grows, the phylum tends to split up
nto secondary phyla, each being a variant or ' harmonic ' of
:he fundamental type. It splits up as it were along the whole
iront of its expansion. It subdivides qualitatively at the same time
is it spreads quantitatively. Disjunction starts again. Sometimes
:he new subdivisions seem merely to correspond to superficial
liversifications — they are effects of chance or of a playful inven-
ive exuberance. But at other times they are precise adaptations
)f the general type to particular needs or habitats. Hence the
ays (' radiations ') that are clearly marked, as we shall see, in
he case of the vertebrates. As is to be expected, the mech-
mism tends to come into action again, in a more attenuated form,
nside each ray. The rays, in their turn, show immediate signs of
"arming out in fresh lines of segmentation. Theoretically there is
10 end to this process. But in fact, as we know by experience, the
phenomenon quickly begins to peter out. The process of fanning
jut soon stops ; and the terminal dilatation of the branches goes
m without any further appreciable splitting up.

The final picture generally presented by a phylum in full
jloom is that of a verticil of consolidated forms.

And now — last touch to the whole phenomenon — we find
it the heart of each clement of the verticil a profound inclination
:owards socialisation. On the subject of socialisation I must
repeat my general observations made above on the vital power of
issociation. Since definite groupings of organised and diffcren-
iated individuals or aggregates (ants, bees, mankind) are relatively
:are in nature, we might be tempted to think of them as freaks of
:volution. But this early impression soon gives way to the
apposite conviction — that they exemplify one of the most
:ssential laws of organised matter. Is it the last resort employed
oy the living group to augment by mutual adherence its resis-
:ance to destruction and its capacity for conquest ? Is it a useful

117

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

means for increasing inner wealth by pooling resources ? What-
ever the fundamental reason may be, the fact is there : once
they have attained their definitive form at the end of each verti-
cillate ray, the elements of a phylum tend to come together and
form societies just as surely as the atoms of a solid body tend to
crystallise.

Once it has achieved this last progress in consolidating and
individualising the extremities of its ramification, the phylum
can be said to have attained its full maturity. It will persist, from
now on, until it is thinned out and then eliminated either by
internal weakening or external competition. Then, except for the
accidental survival of a few permanently fixed lines, its story has
come to an end — unless by a process of self-fertilisation it starts
somewhere or other shooting out a new bud.

To understand the mechanism of this revivification, we must
return once again to the idea or symbol of groping. As we have
already seen, the formation of a verticil is explained in the first
place by the phylum's need to pluralise itself in order to cope
with a variety of different needs or possibilities. But since the
number of stems is always on the increase, and since, moreover,
each stem that splits up increases the number of individuals,
' trials ' and ' experiments ' increase in number too. The fanning
out of the phylum involves a forest of exploring antennae. And
when one of these chances upon the fissure, the formula, giving
access to a new compartment of life, then instead of becoming
fixed or merely spreading out in monotonous variations, the
branch finds all its mobility once more. It enters on mutation.
Through the new opening, another pulsation of life surges, soon
to divide in its turn into verticils under the influence of the
combined forces of aggregation and disjunction. A new phylum
appears, grows, and spreads out above tnc branch on which it
was born though without necessarily stifling or exhausting it.
And so the process continues. Perhaps a third branch germinates
on the second, and yet a fourth on the third— always provided
the branches are on the right path and the general equilibrium
of the biosphere is favourable.

118

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

c. Effects of Distance

Thus, by the very rhythm of its development, each line of life
follows a process of alternate contraction and expansion. It takes
on the appearance of a series of knots and bidges, strung like
beads, a sequence of narrow peduncles and spreading leaves.

But this gives only a theoretical representation of what
happens. For the process to be seen as it really is, we should
require a terrestrial witness simultaneously present through the
whole of duration, and the very idea is monstrous. In reality, the
ascent of life can only be apprehended by us from the standpoint
of a short instant, that is through an immense layer of lapsed
time. What is granted to our experience and which subsequently
constitutes the ' phenomenon ' is thus not the evolutionary
movement in itself; it is this movement corrected according to
its alteration by the effects of distance. How does this alteration
show itself ? Quite simply through the accentuation (rapidly
increasing with the distance) of the fan-structure deriving from
the phyletic radiations of life. This happens, moreover, in two
different ways ; first by exaggeration of the apparent dispersion
of the phyla and subsequently by the apparent suppression of the
peduncles.

Exaggeration of the apparent dispersion oj the phyla. This first
optical illusion, affecting all observation, is due to the ageing and
to the ' decimation ' of the living branches as a result of age.
Only an infinitesimal number of the organisms that have grown
successively on the tree of life exist for us to inspect today. And,
despite all the efforts of palaeontology, many extinct forms will
remain unknown to us for ever. As a result of this destruction,
many gaps are continually forming in the ramifications of the
animal and vegetable kingdom, and the farther back we go, the
larger the gaps are. Dried up branches have broken off. Leaves
have fallen. Many transitional forms have disappeared and their
absence often makes the surviving lines of generation look gaunt

119

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

and solitary. Duration, which with one hand multiplies its
creations ahead, works no less diligently with the other hand
thinning out the ranks in the rear. By so doing, it separates them
off and isolates them more and more in our vision, while at the
same time, by another and more subde process, it gives us the
illusion of seeing them floating like clouds, rootless, over the
abyss of past ages.

Suppression of the peduncles. Since the heroic times of Lamarck
and Darwin, the favourite argument employed against the trans-
formists has always lain in pointing out their incapacity to prove
the birth of a species in terms of material traces. ' Admittedly you
show us,' say these objectors, ' a succession of varying forms in
past ages, and we will even concede that you are able to demon-
strate the transformation of those forms within certain limits.
But however primitive it is, your first mammalian is already a
mammal, your first equine already a horse, and so on all along
the line. Accordingly, though there may well be evolution
within a given type, we see no new type produced by evolution.'
So the increasingly rare survivors of the ' fixed-type ' school
still contend.

Quite apart from all the arguments that can be based, as we
shall see, on the continual accumulation of palaeontological
evidence, there is a more weighty answer (a conclusive proof in
fact) with which the ' fixed-type ' school's case can be rebutted.
It consists in denying the initial assumption. What die anti-
transformists are demanding is nothing less than that we should
show them the ' peduncle ' of a phylum. But this demand is both
poindess and unreasonable. To satisfy it we should have to
change the very nature of the world and the conditions under
which we perceive it.

Nothing is so delicate and fugitive by its very nature as a
beginning. As long as a zoological group is young, its characters
remain indeterminate, its structure precarious and its dimensions
scant. It is composed of relatively few individual units, and these
change rapidly. In space as in duration, the peduncle (or, which
comes to the same thing, the bud) of a living branch corresponds

120

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

to a minimum of differentiation, expansion and resistance. What,
then, will be the effect of time on this area of weakness ?

Inevitably to destroy all vestiges of it.

Beginnings have an irritating but essential fragility, and one
that should be taken to heart by all who occupy themselves with
history.

It is the same in every domain : when anything really new
begins to germinate around us, we cannot distinguish it — for the
very good reason that it could only be recognised in the light of
what it is going to be. Yet, if, when jt has reached full growth,
we look back to find its starting point, we only find that the
starting point itself is now hidden from our view, destroyed or
forgotten. Close as they are to us, where are the first Greeks and
Romans ? Where are the first shutdes, chariots or hearth-stones ?
And where, even after the shortest lapse of time, are the first
motor-cars, aeroplanes or cinemas ? In biology, in civilisation, in
linguistics, as in all things, time, like a draughtsman with an
eraser, rubs out every weak line in the drawing of life. By a
mechanism whose detail in each individual case seems avoidable
and accidental, but which, taken over a wide range, expresses a
fundamental condition of our knowledge, embryos, peduncles
and all early stages of growth fade and vanish as they recede into
the past. Except for the fixed maxima, the consolidated achieve-
ments, nothing, neither trace nor testimony, subsists of what has
gone before. In other words, the terminal enlargements of the
fans are only prolonged into the present by their survivors or
their fossils.

With that understood, there is nothing surprising in our
finding, when we look back, that everything seems to have burst
into the world ready made. 1 That which moves automatically
tends to disappear from our view (by the selective absorption of
1 If our machines (cars, planes, etc.) were swallowed up in some cataclysm
and ' fossilised ', future geologists, finding them, would get the same im-
pression as we get from the pterodactyl. Represented only by the latest makes,
these products of our invention would seem to them to have been created
without any previous evolutionary groping — completed and ' fixed ' at the
first attempt.

121

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

the ages) to become resolved into a discontinuous succession of
levels and stabilities throughout the whole domain of what
appears to us. 1

The destructiveness of the past, superimposed on the con-
structiveness of growth, enables us in the light of science to
distinguish and make a diagram of the ramifications of the tree
of life.

Let us try to see it in its concrete reality, and to measure it.

3. THE TREE OF LIFE
A. The Main Lines

a. A Quantitative Unit of Evolution : the Layer of the Mammals.
It follows directly from what has gone before that, to get a clear
view of the tree of Life, we must ' make our eyes see ' that part of
it only moderately affected by the corrosive action of time. Not
too close, or the leaves will get in the way ; not too far, or the
branches will lack detail.

Where in nature today can we find such a privileged region ?
Undoubtedly in that great family, the mammals.

If mankind constitutes a group which is still ' immature ', the
mammals form a group which is both adult and fresh. Geology
provides us with positive evidence of this, and a simple inspection
of the internal structure of the group is enough to prove it. Not
reaching full florescence until the Tertiary era, their grouping
stiU leaves visible an appreciable number of their most delicate
appendices. That is why the kingdom of the mammals has long
been and still is the happy hunting-ground for transformist ideas.

1 I remark later (footnote p. 186) on the subject of monogenism ' on the
non-fortuitous impossibility wc find ourselves in (for fortuitous reasons in
every case — cf. Coumot) to get beyond a certain limit of precision (of separa-
tion ') in our perception of the very distant past. In all directions (towards the
very old and very small, but also towards the very big and very slow) our
view is eventually blurred, and outside a certain radius we distinguish nothing
at all.

122

Mammalia

/ PERMIAN

diagram i. The development oj the Tetrapods in Layers
(Birds omitted). The figures on the left indicate millions
of years.

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Diag. i shows us the main lines of the group. But let us begin
by focussing our attention on the younger and more progressive
branch of the mammals — die placentals. 1

From an evolutionary (one could even say a ' physiological ')
point of view, the placental mammals, taken in the mass, con-
stitute what I shall speak of here as a biota. By this I mean a
verticillate group whose elements are not only related by birth
but are mutually auxiliary and complementary in the effort to
subsist and multiply.

To begin to understand this important point which the
American school of palaeontology is fond of emphasising, we
have only to observe in a suitable light the distribution of those
animal forms with which we are all most familiar — the herbivores
and the rodents who get their food directly from the vegetable
kingdom, the insectivores similarly predatory on the arthropoda,
the carnivores battening on both these groups, and the omnivores
who dine at every table. Those are the four dominant radiations
and they coincide substantially with die generally accepted
classification of phyla.

Let us now consider these four stems or sectors separately.
They sub-divide, splitting up easily into subordinate units. Take
for instance the richest of them at present — the herbivores.
According to the two different ways in which the extremities of
the limbs are transformed into feet for running (by the hyper-
development of two fingers or the single median one), we see
this group separating into two great families, the Artiodactyla
and the Perissodactyla, each formed by a collection of large and
distinct lineages. In the Perissodactyla we find the obscure
crowd of tapirs, the short but astonishing branch of the Titano-
theridae, the Chalicotheridae with digging claws which man
in his early days may possibly have seen, the Rhinocerotidae
horned and hornless, and lastly the solipedal Equidae, imitated
in South America by a completely independent phylum. In

1 So called in contrast to the a-placentals (marsupials, etc.) the embryo being
nourished by a special organ, the placenta, which enables it to develop to
maturity in the uterus.

124

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

the Artiodactyla we find the Suidae, the Camelidac, the Cervidae
and the Antilopidae — to say nothing of other less vigorous stems
which are nevertheless as differentiated and as interesting to the
palaeontologist. And we have not mentioned that abundant
and robust group, the Proboscidia. Conforming to the rule
of the 'suppression of the peduncles', the early history of
each of these groups is lost in the mists of the past. But once
they have appeared wc can follow each one of them through
the principal phases of their geographical expansion ; also
through their successive sub-divisions into sub-verticils which
proceed almost indefinitely; and lastly by the exaggeration due
to orthogenesis of certain skeletal characteristics, dental or cranial,
which generally end up by making them monstrous or delicate.

Nor is this all. For we can distinguish, superimposed on
this florescence of genera and species issued from die four funda-
mental radiations, another network corresponding to attempts
made here, and there to abandon life on the ground and take to
the air, the water, or even to an underground existence. Besides
forms specialised for running there are arboreal and even flying
forms, swimming forms, and burrowing forms. The Cetacea
and Sirenia seem to have developed surprisingly quickly from
the carnivores and the herbivores. Others (such as the chiroptera,
moles and mole-rats) are derived from the oldest elements of the
placental group, the insectivores and the rodents both dating
from the end of the Secondary era.

One has only to consider this elegantly balanced functional
whole to be convinced that it represents an organic and natural
grouping which is sui generis. This conviction gathers strength
when we realise that it docs not correspond to an isolated except-
ional case, but that similar units have periodically appeared in
the course of the history of life. We only need mention two
examples within the confines of the mammals.

Geology teaches us that during the Tertiary era a fragment
of the placental biota, then in full process of evolution, was cut
off by the sea and imprisoned in the southern half of the American
continent. Now how did this off-shoot react to its isolation ?

125

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Exactly like a plant — that is to say, it reproduced on a smaller
scale the same design as the trunk from which it had been
separated. It set to work to grow its pseudo-elephants, its pseudo-
rodents, its pseudo-horses and its pseudo-monkeys (Platyrrhini).
A complete biota in miniature, a sub-biota within the original
one.

And now for our second example, furnished by the mar-
supials.

To judge by their relatively primitive method of reproduction
and also by dieir present geographical distribution (in surviving
pockets), the marsupials or a-placentals represent a peculiar
stage at the base of the mammalian stem. They must have
flourished before the placentals, forming a separate earlier biota
of their own. On the whole, except for a few strange types (like
that fossil pseudo-Machaerodus recendy found in Patagonia), 1
this marsupial biota has disappeared without leaving a trace.
On the other hand, one of its sub-biota accidentally developed
and conserved in Australia before die Tertiary era and again
through isolation, shows such sharpness of contour and perfection
as still to make the naturalists marvel. At the time of its discovery
by Europeans, Australia, as is well known, was inhabited only
by marsupials. 2 They were of great variety, however, being of
all shapes, sizes and habitats — herbivorous and cursorial mar-
supials, carnivorous marsupials, insectivorous marsupials, mar-
supial rats, marsupial moles, etc. It would be impossible to
imagine a more striking example of the power inherent in every
phylum to differentiate itself into a sort of closed and physio-
logically complete organism.

This grasped, let us now lift our eyes to the vast system
enclodse by the two biota, the placentals and a-placentals, con-
sidered together. Zoologists noticed at an early date that in all
the forms composing these two groups, the molar teeth were

1 Machaerodus or sabre-toothed tiger. Tliis big feline, common at the end
of the Tertiary era and at the beginning of the Quaternary era, is strangely
mimicked by the Pliocene carnivorous marsupial of South America.

2 Except for a group of rodents and (the latest arrivals) man and his dog.

iz6

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

essentially tritubercular, the projections of upper and lower teeth
neady fitting beside each other ; an insignificant trait in itself,
but intriguing because of its constancy. How explain the
universality of such an accidental characteristic ? The key to
the enigma has been provided by a discovery made in certain
Jurassic beds in England. In the Middle Jurassic period, in a
flash, we get a glimpse of a first pulsation of mammals — a
world of small animals no bigger than rats or shrews. And in
these tiny creatures, already extraordinarily varied, the dental
type is not yet fixed, as it is in nature at the present day. Among
them we can already find the tritubercular type ; but alongside
it all sorts of other combinations may be observed in the develop-
ment and opposition of molars and cusps. These other com-
binations have been eliminated long since. From this only one
conclusion can be drawn. With the possible exception of the
Ornithorhynchus and the Echidna (paradoxical oviparous forms
sometimes supposed to be a prolongation of the ' multi-
tubercular ' type), existing mammals all derive from one narrow
unique group. Taken all together they represent (in a state of
florescence) but a single one of the many stems into which the Jurassic
verticil of the mammals was divided — namely the tritubercular. 1

At this point we have almost reached the limit of what the
opacity of the past will allow us to see. Beneath this level,
except for the probable existence right at the end of the Triassic
period of yet another verticil to which the multitubercular type
would seem to belong, the story of the mammals is lost to us.

But at least we can say that towards die top and all round
it, their group, naturally isolated by the rupture of its peduncle,
stands out with sufficient sharpness and individuality for us to
accept it as a practical unit of evolutionary mass '.

Let us call this unit a layer.

We shall be needing that unit at once.
b. A Layer of Layers : the Tetrapods. When diey measure the

1 Which might alternatively be called the ' scptem-vertcbraces ' since, by
another coincidence which is equally unexpected and significant, all have
seven cervical vertebrae whatever the length of the neck.

127

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

distance of the nebulae, astronomers calculate in light years. If
we, working back from the mammals, want to enlarge and
prolong our vision of the tree of life downwards, we must
calculate in layers.

Let us begin with the layer of the reptiles of the Secondary era.

When we lose sight of it below the Jurassic period, the mam-
malian branch does not disappear into a sort of vacuum. Instead
we find it enveloped and covered over by a thick living growth
of an entirely different appearance : of Dinosaurians, Pterc-
saurians, Ichthyosaurians, Crocodilia and many other monsters
less familiar to the layman in palaeontology. Amongst these,
the zoological distances between the various forms are consider-
ably greater than between the various orders of mammals. Yet
three characteristics strike us at once. Firstly, we are dealing
with a ramifying system. Secondly, the ramifications are already
far advanced or even nearing the end of their florescence. Thirdly,
by and large, the whole group represents nothing else than an
immense and perhaps complex biota. The herbivorous forms
are often gigantic. Their satellites and enemies, the carnivores,
are heavy or leaping types. Besides there are the flying types,
with their bat-like membranes or their birds' feathers. Lasdy,
swimming types, as streamlined as dolphins.

In the distance this reptilian world seems to us more com-
pressed than the mammalian, yet, judged by its expansion and
its final complexity, it must be assumed to have lasted at least
as long. Anyhow, it disappears into the depths in die same way.
About the middle of the Triassic age, Dinosaurians can still be
recognised ; but hardly emerging from another layer which
itself is approaching its decline, diat of the Permian reptiles, best
typified in the Theromorphs.

Clumsy and deformed and rare in our museums, the Thero-
morphs are much less popular than the Diplodocus or the
Iguanodons. This does not prevent their taking a position of
growing importance on the zoological horizon. At first regarded
merely as freaks belonging exclusively to South Africa, they
have now been definitively identified as the sole representatives

128

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

of a complete and special stage in continental vertebrate life.
At one moment, before the Dinosaurs, before the mammals,
they were the creatures that occupied and possessed all land that
was not covered by sea. Standing squarely on their strongly
articulated limbs, and often provided with teeth of molar form,
they might well be called the first quadrupeds to be firmly estab-
lished on terra firma. In the age in which we become aware of
their presence, we find them abounding in a strange variety of
forms — horned, crested, armoured — indicating (as always) a
group at the end of its evolutionary career. A rather mono-
tonous group, as a matter of fact, under its superficial extrava-
gances. One, moreover, which does not yet exhibit clearly the
nervures of a true biota. It is nevertheless a fascinating group by
virtue of die spread and the potentialities of its verticil. On the
one hand there are the unchangeable tortoises, and at the other
extreme, types which in their agility and cranial construction
are very progressive. We have every reason to believe that
it was among the latter that the long dormant shoot finally
appeared which was to become the mammalian branch.

Then another ' tunnel '. At these distances, the slices of
duration are increasingly compressed under the weight of the
past. When, at the lowest level of the Permian era and below it,
we discern another surface of the inhabited earth, we find it now
occupied only by amphibians crawling over the slime. The
amphibians — a throng of squat or serpentine creatures among
which it is often difficult to distinguish adult from larval forms ;
skin glabrous or armoured ; vertebrae tubular or in a mosaic of
tiny bones. Here again, following the general rule, we can only
find an already highly differentiated world, almost coming to an
end ; and there may well be many other layers that we confuse
in this writhing mass, through sediments about whose thickness
and immense duration we are still unclear. But one thing is sure.
At this level we are witnessing the emergence of an animal
group from the waters in which it was nourished and formed.

And at this extreme beginning of their sub-aerial life, the
vertebrates display a surprising characteristic which we must

129

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

pause to consider. In every variety the skeletal formula is the
same, particularly in the number and composition of the loco-
motory limbs, to say nothing of the marvellous similarities of
the cranial bones. What is the reason for this ?

The fact that all amphibians, reptiles and mammals have four
legs, and only four, might be explained in terms of mere con-
vergence towards a particularly simple mode of locomotion
(though the insects never have less than six legs). But how are
we to justify in purely mechanical terms the complete similarity
of structure in these four appendices ? In the anterior pair, the
single humerus, then the two bones of the forearm and the five
digits of the hand. Is not this, yet again, one of those accidental
combinations which could only once have been discovered and
accomplished ? If so, the conclusion already forced upon us in
the case of the tritubercularity of mammals looms up again.
Despite their extraordinary variety, terrestrial air-breathing
animals can only represent variation superposed on a very special
solution of life.

Thus when we go back towards its origins, the immense and
complicated ramification of the walking vertebrates folds back
and closes in upon itself in a single stem.

A single peduncle closes and defines at its base a layer of
layers — the world of four-footcdness.

c. The Branch oj the Vertebrates. In the case of mammals, we
have been able to pick out the verticil from which the ' tri-
tubercular stem shot off and isolated itself. Science has made
less progress about the origin of the amphibians. We have no
hesitation, however, in pointing to the only region of life in
which four-footedness could have germinated amongst other
tentative combinations. It must have done so somewhere among
fish with lobed and ' limb-like ' fins whose layer, once wide-
spread, is now represented only by a few ' living fossils ' — the
Dipnoi (or lung-fishes) and, a very recent surprise, the ' Crosso-
pterygian ', recently fished up in the southern seas.

Made superficially ' homogenic ' by mechanical adaptation
to swimming, the fish (it would be better to call them the Pisci-

130

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

formes) are an assembly of monstrous complexity. We seem
to find here more than anywhere numbers of layers accumulated
and confused under the same heading. There are relatively
young layers developing in the oceans at the very time when
those of the four-footed were spreading over the continents.
There are also ancient layers, still more numerous, ending up
at a very low stage near the Silurian, at a fundamental verticil
from which we see two principal stems diverging : Pisciformes
with one nostril and no jaws, represented in nature today by the
lamprey alone, and Pisciformes with jaws and two nostrils,
from which all the rest have been derived.

After what I have said above about the concatenation of
terrestrial forms, I will no longer attempt to unearth and analyse
this other world. I prefer to draw attention to a fact of a dif-
ferent order which we meet here for the first time. The oldest
fishes we know are for the most part strongly, even abnormally,
scaly. 1 Under this first and apparently rather fruitless attempt
at external consolidation was an internal skeleton still entirely
cartilaginous. As we go back, the vertebrates appear less and less
ossified internally. That is why we lose trace of them, no vestige
remaining even in sediments that have come down to us intact.
Now this is only a particular example of a general phenomenon
of immense importance— whatever living group we take, it
always ends by drowning itself in the depths of mollification. This
is an infallible way of causing peduncles to vanish.

Thus below the Devonian level the Pisciformes disappear
into a sort of foetal or larval phase, incapable of fossilisation.
Were it not for the accidental survival of the strange Amphioxus,
we should have no idea of the multiple stages that the Chotdate
type had to go through before being ready to fill the waters,
pending its invasion of the land.

So at the base a vast vacuum ends the story of that enormous
edifice which includes all the quadrupeds and all the fishes, the
branch oj the vertebrates.

1 Without this ossified integument they would have left nothing behind
them and we should never have known of them.

131

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

d. The Remaining Branches of Life. With the vertebrate branch
we have, within the biosphere, the greatest definite group known
to systematic biology. Two other branches, and two only,
besides the vertebrate, contribute to forming the main ramifi-
cation of life — one consituted by the worms (Annelida) and
arthropods, the other by the vegetable kingdom. The first
consolidated by chitin or calcareous matter, the second by
cellulose, they, too, succeeded in breaking out of their watery
prison, to spread vigorously in the atmosphere. Indeed, in
nature today, plants and insects are locked in a struggle with
boned animals for the world's available space.

It would be possible to analyse these two other branches as
we have just analysed the vertebrates, but I think we can dis-
pense with that. At the top we find the newer groups, rich in
delicate verticils ; deeper, the layers with stems more firmly
drawn but less well equipped ; and right at the base the fading-
away into a world of unstable chemical forms. Thus we see
the same general pattern of development ; but because in the
latter case the branches are obviously older, there is greater com-
plication and, in the instance of the insects, we observe extreme
forms of socialisation.

There seems no reason to doubt that in the abysses of time
these various lines converge towards some common pole of
dispersion. But long before we reach the junction of the Chor-
dates, the Annelids and the plants (the junction of the first two
being among the mctazoa, while their junction with the plants
is much lower still and among the protozoa), their respective
trunks vanish into a complex of extremely strange forms :
Porifera, Echinodermata, Coelenterata. All tentative answers
to the problem of life, a thicket of abortive branches.

All this emerges beyond question (though we arc unable to
say how, so wide is the breach of continuity caused by duration)
from another world quite unbelievably old and multiform :
infusoria, various protozoa and bacteria — free cells, naked or
shelled in which the kingdoms of life, arc confused and which
science is unable to classify. Applied to them, the words animal

132

THE EXPANSION OF UFE

or vegetable lose all meaning. We are no longer able to deter-
mine whether we are dealing with layers piled on layers and
branches on branches, or a ' mycelium ' of confused fibres such
as we find in a mushroom. Nor can wc say from what all this
germinated. Below the Precambrian stage, the unicellular
creatures too lose every kind of calcareous or siliceous skeletal
form. And so the roots of the tree of life are lost to view in
the unknowable world of soft tissue and the metamorphosis of
primaeval slime.

b. The Dimensions

So we bring to a close our very sketchy diagram of the forms
that have been observed and labelled by the patient labour of
naturalists from Aristotle to Linnaeus and onwards. In the course
of describing it, we have already tried to communicate the
enormous complexity of the world we were attempting to
resuscitate. It remains for us, by a final effort of vision and
facing it as a whole, to realise more explicitly its prodigious
dimensions. Of their own accord our minds always tend, not
only to clarify (which is their function) but also to condense
and abbreviate the realities they touch. They falter, over-
burdened by the weight of distances and multitudes. So having
sketched, for what it is worth, the expansion of life, it is incum-
bent on us to restore to the elements of our diagram their true
dimensions, in number, in volume and in duration.

Let us now attempt this.

First of all, in number, for the sake of simplicity our sketch
of the animate world had to be made in bold strokes — families,
orders, biota, layers, branches. But in dealing with these
collective units, have we really even begun to imagine die multi-
tudes that in fact we were dealing with ? Anyone who wishes
to think in terms of evolution, or write about it, should start
off by wandering through one of those great museums — there
are four or five in the world — in which (at the cost of efforts
whose heroism and spiritual value will one day be under-

133

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

stood) a host of travellers has succeeded in concentrating in a
handful of rooms the entire spectrum of life. There, without
bothering about names, let him surrender himself to what he
sees around him, and become impregnated by it : by the uni-
verse of the insects whose ' reliable ' species are counted in tens
of thousands ; by the molluscs, thousands more, inexhaustibly
variegated in their marblings and their convolutions ; by the
fishes, unexpected, capricious, and as prettily marked as butter-
flies ; by the birds, hardly less extravagant, of every form,
feather, and beak ; by the antelopes of every coat, carriage, and
diadem. And so on, and so on. And for each word, which brings
to our minds a dozen manageable forms, what multiplicity, what
impetus, what effervescence ! And to think that all we sec are
merely the survivors ! What would it be like if all the others
were there too ? In every epoch of the earth, on every level
of" evolution, other museums would have displayed the same
teeming luxuriance. Added together, the hundreds of thousands
of names in our catalogues do not amount to one millionth of
the leaves that have sprouted so far on the tree of lile.

Next, in volume. By this I mean : what is the relative import-
ance, quantitatively, of the various zoological and botanical
groups in nature ? What share belongs to each, materially, in
the general assemblage of organised beings ?

To give a rough idea of their proportion, I am reproducing
here the very illuminating diagram in which a master in this
field, M. Cu£not, has shown the principal departments of the
animal kingdom, in the light of the most recent advances in
science. This is a diagram of position rather than of structure,
but it answers precisely the question 1 am asking.

Looking at it, we may well receive an initial shock — the sort
of shock we get when an astronomer speaks of our solar system
as a simple star, of all our stars as a single Milky Way, and
of our Milky Way as a mere atom among other galaxies.
Mammals — does not that word normally sum up our idea of
'animal ' ? Here it is, a poor little lobe, a belated offshoot on
the tree of life. Around it, on the other hand, and beneath —

134

diagram 2. The ' Tree of Life' after Cuenot. On litis
diagram each principal lobe (or bunch) represents a grade ill
least as important (morplwlogically and quantitatively) as
that of the whole of the Mammalia taken together. Below
the line AB, the forms are aquatic; above it they live on land.

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

what a teeming rivalry of types, of whose existence, magnitude
and multitude we have been unaware ! Mysterious creatures
we may well have come upon, hopping among dead leaves or
crawling over a beach, and upon which we may have bestowed
an idle glance without pausing to wonder about their origin or
significance— creatures negligible in size and today probably in
number too. Here these despised forms come into their own.
By the wealth of their modalities, by the length of time it took
nature to produce them, they represent each of them a world
as important as ours. Quantitatively— I emphasise the word— we
are only one among these others, and the latest comers at that.

Lastly, in duration. This is, as usual, the most difficult recon-
struction for our imaginations. As I have said already, the
different levels of the past are compressed and telescoped in our
vision even more than the horizons of space. How are we to
separate them out ?

To put the depths of life into their true perspective, we had
best return to what I have called above the layer of the mammals.
Because this layer is relatively young, we have some idea of the
time required for its development from the moment at the end of
the Cretaceous period when it clearly emerges above the reptiles :
the whole of the Tertiary era and a little more— some eighty
million years. Let us now assume that, on a given zoological
branch, the lateral layers strike off at regular intervals, as on
the trunk of a pine-tree. So that their periods of maximum
florescence (which alone are clearly registrable) follow one
another in the case of the vertebrates at a distance of eighty
million years apart. All we need to do to estimate the approxi-
mate duration of a zoological interval is to count up the number
of layers in it and multiply by 80,000,000. We have three layers,
for instance, at the lowest estimate, between the mammals and
the base of the tetrapods. The figures become imposing. But
they taJly well enough with current geological ideas as to the
immensity of the Triassic, Permian and Carboniferous ages.

We can try to follow another method in a more approximate
way from branch to branch. Within one and the same layer—

136

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

such as the mammals, once again — we can apprehend vaguely
the average structural divergence of types, a divergence which,
as we have seen, took some eighty million years. Now compare
the mammals, the insects and the higher plants ; unless (which
is possible) the three branches at whose ends these three groups
flourish did not strike off exactly from the same stem but shot
up separately from a common ' mycelium '. What length of
time was necessary to effect the gigantic divergence we see ?
Here the zoologist's figures would seem as if tending to contradict
the geologist's. Physicists, having measured the lead-content of
a radiferous Precambrian mineral, are prepared to allow only
fifteen hundred million years from the earliest sediment of
carbon onwards. Must not the first organisms have existed long
before these first vestiges ? Besides, if there is disagreement,
which of the two time-measurements shall we trust to count
the years of the earth ? The slow disintegration of radium or the
slow aggregation of living matter ?

If it takes five thousand years for a mere sequoia to reach
its full growth (and no one yet has seen one die a natural death)
what can be the total age of the tree of life ?

c. The Evidence

Now we can see the tree of life standing before us. A strange
tree, no doubt. We could call it the negative of a tree, for
contrary to what happens with our great forest trees, its branches
and trunk arc revealed to our eyes only by ever-widening gaps ;
an almost petrified tree, as it appears to us, so long do the buds take
to open. Many that are half-opened now we shall never know
in any other state. A clearly drawn tree, none the less, with its
superimposed foliage of living species. In its main lines and
vast dimensions, it stands there before us covering all the earth.
Before attempting to probe the secret of its lite, let us take a
good look at it. For, from a merely external contemplation of
it, there is a lesson and a force to be drawn from it : the sense
of its testimony.

137

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

We still find here and there in the world people whose minds
are suspicious and sceptical as regards evolution. Having only
a book-knowledge of nature and naturalists these people imagine
that the transformist battle is still carried on as in the days
of Darwin. And because biologists continue to discuss the
mechanisms by which species could have been formed, they
imagine that biologists hesitate (or that they could hesitate
without suicide) about the fact and reality of such a develop-
ment.

But the real situation is quite otherwise.

In the course of this chapter devoted to die concatenations
of the organised world, the reader may have been surprised at
my failing so far to mention the still lively quarrels over the
distinction between the ' soma ' and the ' germplasin ', over the
existence and function of ' genes ', over the transmission or
non-transmission of acquired characters. The truth is that at
the point I have reached in my inquiry, these questions do not
concern me directly. To provide anthropogenesis with a natural
framework and man with a cradle — to guarantee, 1 mean, the
substantial objectivity ot an evolution — one thing, and one thing
only, is necessary. Namely that the general phylogenesis of life
(whatever the process and springboard of it may be) should be
as clearly recognisable as the individual orthogenesis through
which we see without the least astonishment every Living creature
pass.

Now a quasi-mechanical proof of this global growth of the
biosphere imposes itself inescapably on our nunds by the material
pattern at which we inevitably end up with each new effort to
fix, point by point, the contours and nervures of the organised
world.

No one would think of doubting the gyratory origin of the
spiral nebulae, the progressive accretion of particles at the heart
of a crystal or of a stalagmite or the concretion of the woody
' bundles ' round the axis of a stalk. Certain geometrical dis-
position, which seem to us perfecdy stable, arc the trace and
irrefutable sign of kinematics. How could we hesitate even for

138

THE EXPANSION OF LIFE

a moment about the evolutionary origins of the layer of life
on the earth ?

Under our efforts at analysis life sheds its husk. It breaks
down to an infinite degree into an anatomically and physio-
logically coherent system of overlapping fans. 1 We find barely
appreciable fans of sub-species and races ; larger ones of species
and genera ; still larger ones of biota, then of layers, then of
branches. And, to end with, the whole assemblage, animal and
vegetable, forming by association one single gigantic biota,
rooted perhaps, like a simple stem, in some verticil steeped in
the depths of the mega-molecular world. Life would thus be
a simple branch based on something else.

From top to bottom, from the biggest to the smallest, one
same visible structure whose design, reinforced by the very
disposition of the shadows and voids, is accentuated and pro-
longed (no hypothesis this!) by the quasi-spontaneous arrange-
ment of the unforeseen elements brought forth by the day.
Each newly-discovered form finds its natural place, though of
course nothing within the framework is absolutely ' new '.
What more do we need to be convinced that all this was bow,
that all this has grown ?

Thenceforward we can go on for years arguing about the way
in which the enormous organism could have come into being.
As we look closer at the bewildering complexity of the mechan-
ism, our brains begin to reel. How arc we to reconcile this
persistent growth with the determinism of the molecules, the
blind play of the chromosomes, the apparent incapacity to
transmit individual acquisitions by generation ? How, in other
words, arc we to reconcile the external, ' finalist ' evolution of

1 As regards these fans, it would ot course be possible to trace the connec-
tions in another way, especially in giving more importance to the parallelisms
and convergence. The tetrapods, tor example, could he regarded as a bundle
composed ot several stems derived from dirlcrent verticils, each one having
arrived similarly at the quadruped formula. Tliis polvphvletic scheme tits
the facts less well, in mv opinion. In anv case its truth would not in the least
affect my fundamental thesis, viz. that lite displays an organically articulated
unity which manifestly indicates the phenomenon ol growth.

139

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

phenotypes with the internal, mechanistic evolution of genotypes ?
Though we take it apart, we still cannot understand how the
machine works. This may well be, but the machine is mean-
while standing in front of us ; and it works all the same. Be-
cause chemistry is still floundering over the formation of granites,
should we dispute the fact that the continents become more
granitic year by year ?

Like all things in a universe in which time is definitely estab-
lished as a fourth dimension, life is, and only can be, a reality of
evolutionary nature and dimension. Physically and historically
it corresponds with a function X which determines the position
of every living thing in space, in duration and in form.

This is the fundamental fact which requires an explanation :
but the evidence for it is henceforward above all verification, as
well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by
experience.

At this degree of generalisation, it may be said that the
problem of transformism no longer exists. The question is
settled once and for all. To shake our belief now in the reality of
biogenesis, it would be necessary to uproot the tree of life and
undermine the entire structure of the world. 1

1 As a matter of fact, in view of the impossibility of empirically perceiving
any entity, animate or inanimate, otherwise than as engaged in the time-space
series, evolutionary theory has long since ceased to be a hypothesis, to become
a (dimensional) condition which all hypotheses of physics or biology must
henceforth satisfy. Biologists and palaeontologists are still arguing today
about the way things happen, and above ail about the mechanism of Life's
transformations, and whether there is a preponderance of chance (the Neo-
Darwinians) or of invention (the Nco-Lamarckians) in the emergence of new
characters. But on the general and fundamental fact that organic evolution
exists, applicable equally to life as a whole or to any given living creature in
particular, all scientists are today in agreement for die very good reason that
they couldn't practise science if they thought otherwise. The one regret wc
might express here (and not without astonishment) is that despite the clearness
of the facts, this unanimity does not go so far as to admit the 'galaxy ' of Living
forms constitutes (as posited in these pages) a vast 'orthogenetic ' movement
of involution on an ever-greater complexity and consciouness. But wc shall
return to this at the conclusion of this book.

140

CHAPTER THREE

DEMETER

Throughout the foregoing chapter we spoke of growth to
express life's way of proceeding. We were even able to go
some way towards recognising the principle behind this impetus
which seemed to us Linked up with the phenomenon of controlled
additivity. By a continuous accumulation of properties (whatever
the exact hereditary mechanism involved) life acts like a snow-
ball. It piles characters upon characters in its protoplasm. It
becomes more and more complex. But, taken as a whole, what
is the meaning of this movement of expansion ? Is it like the
confined and functional explosion of the internal combustion
engine ? Or is it a disorderly release of energy in all directions
like the blast of a high explosive ?

That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now, as
I have said, common ground among scientists. Whether or not
that evolution is directed is another question. Asked whether
life is going anywhere at the end of its transformations, nine
biologists out of ten will today say no, even passionately. They
will say : ' It is abundantly clear to every eye that organic matter
is in a state of continual metamorphosis, and even that this
metamorphosis brings it with time towards more and more
improbable forms. But what scale can we find to assess the
absolute or even relative value of these fragile constructions ?
By what right, for instance, can we say that a mammal, or even
man, is more advanced, more perfect, than a bee or a rose ? To
some extent we can arrange beings in increasingly wide circles
according to the distance in time which separates them from the

141

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

initial ceil. But, once a certain degree of differentiation has been
reached, we can no longer find any scientific grounds for pre-
ferring one of these laborious products of nature to another.
They are different solutions — but each equivalent to the next.
One spoke of the wheel is as good as any other ; no one of the
lines appears to lead anywhere in particular.'

Science in its development — and even, as I shall show, man-
kind in its march — is marking time at this moment, because
men's minds are reluctant to recognise that evolution has a
precise orientation and a privileged axis. Weakened by this
fundamental doubt, the forces of research are scattered, and there
is no determination to build the earth.

Leaving aside all anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism,
I believe I can see a direction and a line of progress for life, a
line and a direction which are in fact so well marked that I am
convinced their reality will be universally admitted by the
science of tomorrow. And I want here to make the reader
understand why.

i. ARIADNE'S THREAD

To begin with, as we are dealing here with degrees of organic
complication, let us try to find an order in the complexity.

Contemplated without any guiding thread, it must be
recognised that the host of living creatures forms qualitatively
an inextricable labyrinth. What is happening, where are we
going through this monotonous succession of ramifications ?
In the course of ages, doubdess, creatures acquire more organs
of increased sensibility. But they also reduce them by specialisa-
tion. Besides, what is the real meaning of the term ' complica-
tion ' ? There are so many different ways in which an animal
can become less simple — differentiation of limbs, of tissues, of
sensory organs, of integument. According to the point of view
adopted, all sorts of distributions are possible. In these multiple
combinations, is there really one which can be said to be truer

142

DEMETER

than the others ? Is there one, that is to say, which gives to the
whole of living things a more satisfying coherence, either in
relation to itself, or in relation to the world to which life finds
itself committed ?

To answer this question, I think wc had better go back to
what I said above about the mutual relations between the
without and the within of things. The essence of the real, I said,
could well be represented by the ' inferiority ' contained by the
universe at a given moment. In that case evolution would
fundamentally be nothing else than the continual growth of
this ' psychic ' or ' radial ' energy, in the course of duration,
beneath and within the mechanical energy I called ' tangential ',
which is practically constant on the scale of our observations
(Book 1, Chapter 2, 3 Spiritual Energy, Section B). And what,
I asked, is the particular co-efficient which empirically expresses
the relationship between the radial and tangential energies of
the world in the course of their respective developments ? Obvi-
ously arrangement, the arrangement whose successive advances
are inwardly reinforced, as we can see, by a continual expansion
and deepening of consciousness.

Let us turn this proposition round (not in a vicious circle,
but by a simple adjustment of perspective). Among the in-
numerable complications undergone by organic matter in
ebullience, we find it hard to distinguish those which are merely
superficial diversifications and those (if any) which would repre-
sent a renewal and re-grouping of the stuff of the universe.
Well then, let us just try to see whether, amongst all the com-
binations tried out by life, some are not organically associated
with a positive variation in the psychism of those beings which
possess it. If so, let us seize on them and follow them ; for, if
my hypothesis be correct, they are undoubtedly the ones which,
among the equivocal mass of insignificant transformations, repre-
sent the very essence of complexity, of essential metamorphosis.
There is every chance that they will lead us somewhere.

Framed in these terms, the problem is immediately solved.
Of course there exists in living organisms a selective mechanism

H3

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

for the play of consciousness. We have merely to look into
ourselves to perceive it— the nervous system. We are in a
positive way aware of one single ' inferiority ' in the world :
our own directly, and at the same time that of other men by
immediate equivalence, thanks to language. But we have every
reason to think that in animals too a certain inwardness exists,
approximately proportional to the development of their brains.
So let us attempt to classify living beings by their degree of
' cerebralisation '. What happens ? An order appears— the very
order we wanted — and automatically.

To begin with, let us turn to that part of the tree of life wc
know best, partly because it is still full of vitality and partly
because we belong to it ourselves— the Chordate branch. In
this group an outstanding characteristic is apparent, one which
has for long been emphasised in palaeontology. It is that we find
from layer to layer, by massive leaps, the nervous system con-
tinually developing and concentrating. We all know the example
of the enormous Dinosaurs whose absurdly small brain was no
more than a narrow string of lobes considerably smaller in
diameter than the spinal chord in the lumbar region, reminding
us of the state of affairs still lower, in the amphibians and the

fishes. But when we pass to the stage above — the mammals

we see a remarkable change.

Among the mammals, that is to say, this time, within a single
layer, the average brain is much more voluminous and convoluted
than in any other group of vertebrates. Yet, when we look
closer, we see not only many inequalities, but a remarkable order
in their distribution. The gradation in the first place follows the
position of the biota. In nature at the present day the placentals
take precedence in the matter of brain over the marsupials. Next,
within the same biotas, we find a gradation according to age.
We see placental brains (except for a few primates) always
relatively smaller and simpler in the lower Tertiary age than in
the Miocene and Pliocene. This is strongly emphasised by extinct
phyla such as the Condylarthra or Dinocerata, those horned
monsters whose brain-case (in size and the spacing of the lobes)

144

DEMBTER

had hardly advanced beyond that of the Secondary reptiles.
This can also be observed within a single line of descent. In the
Eocene carnivores, for instance, the cerebrum, still in the marsupial
stage, is smooth and well separated from the cerebellum. It
would be easy to add to the list. In general it may be said that,
taking any offshoot from any verticil, it is only rarely that we
find that (provided it is long enough) it does not lead in time to
more and more ' cerebralised ' forms.

Taking another branch, the arthropods and the insects, we
find the same phenomenon. Dealing as we are now with another
sort of consciousness, we are less sure of our values, but the
thread which guides still seems to hold. From group to group
and age to age, these forms, psychologically so far removed,
display, like ourselves, the influence of cerebralisation. The
nerve ganglions concentrate ; they become localised and grow
forward in the head. At the same time instincts become more
complex ; and simultaneously the extraordinary phenomena of
socialisation appear, to which we shall have to return.

We could continue this analysis indefinitely. I have said
enough, however, to show how easily the skein is disentangled
once we have found the end. For obvious reasons of con-
venience, naturalists setting out to classify organic forms have
been led to make use of certain variations of ornament, for
instance, or functional modifications of the skeleton. Guided by
orthogenesis affecting the coloration and nervation of wings,
the disposition of limbs, or the shape of teeth, their classification
sorts out the fragments or even the skeleton of a structure in the
living world. But because the lines thus traced correspond only
to the secondary harmonics of evolution, the system as a whole
has neither shape nor movement. On the other hand, from the
moment that the measure (or parameter) of the evolving pheno-
menon is sought in the elaboration of the nervous systems, not
only do the countless genera and species fall naturally into place,
but the entire network of their verticils, their layers, dieir
branches, rises up like a quivering spray of foliage. Not only
does the arrangement of animal forms according to their degree

145 K

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

of cerebralisation correspond exactly to the classification of
systematic biology, but it also confers on the tree of life a sharp-
ness of feature, an impetus, which is incontcstably the hall-mark
of truth. Such coherence — and, let me add, such case, inexhaust-
ible fidelity and evocative power in this coherence — could not
be the result of chance.

Among the infinite modalities in which the complication of
life is dispersed, the differentiation of nervous tissue stands out,
as theory would lead us to expect, as a significant transformation.
It provides a direction ; and therefore it proves that evolution has a
direction.

That is my first conclusion. But it has its corollary. We
began by saying that, among living creatures, the brain was
the sign and measure of consciousness. We have now added
that, among living creatures, the brain is continually perfecting
itself with time, so much so that a given quality of brain appears
essentially linked with a given phase of duration.

The final conclusion proclaims itself, a conclusion which at
one and the same time confirms the bases and controls what
follows in our disquisition. Since, in its totality and throughout
the length of each stem, the natural history of living creatures
amounts on the exterior to the gradual establishment of a vast
nervous system, it therefore corresponds on the interior to the
installation of a psychic state coextensive with the earth. On
the surface, we find the nerve fibres and ganglions ; deep down,
consciousness. We were only looking for a simple rule to sort
out the tangle of appearances. And now (entirely in keeping
with our initial anticipations on the ultimately psychic nature of
evolution) we possess a fundamental variable capable of following
in the past, and perhaps defining in the future, the true curve
of the phenomenon.

Will that solve the problem ? Yes, almost. But on one con-
dition, obviously ; a condition which will seem irksome to
certain scientific prejudice. It is that by a change of front, a
reversal of plane, we abandon the without to delve into the
within of things.

146

DEMETER

2. THE RISE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Let us return to the ' expansionist ' movement of life as it appears
in its broad outline. But this time, instead of losing ourselves
in the labyrinth of arrangements affecting the ' tangential '
energies of the world, let us try to follow the ' radial ' progress
of its internal energies. Now everything becomes definitively
clear — in value, in operation and in hope.

a. To begin with, what is brought to light by this simple change
of variable is the place occupied by the development of life in the
general history of our planet.

When we discussed the origin of the first cells, we considered
that, if their spontaneous generation took place only once in the
whole of time, it was apparently because the initial formation
of the protoplasm was bound up with a state which the general
chemistry of the earth passed through only once. The earth, we
said, should be regarded as the seat of a certain global and irre-
versible evolution, much more important for scientists to con-
sider than any superficial oscillations. We said, moreover, that
the primordial emergence of organised matter marked a critical
point on the curve of this evolution.

After that the phenomenon seemed to become lost in the
multitude of ramifications, to the point that we almost forgot it.
But now we sec it emerging again, on the tide, with the ride
(duly recorded by the nervous systems), whose flood carries the
ving mass ever onward towards more consciousness. This is the
great primaeval movement reappearing, whose sequel we now
grasp.

Like the geologist occupied in recording the movements of
the earth, the faultings and foldings, the palaeontologist who
fixes the position of the animal forms in time is apt to sec in the
past nothing but a monotonous series of homogeneous pulsations.
In these records, the mammals succeeded the reptiles which
succeeded the amphibians, just as the Alps replaced the Cimmerian
Mountains which had in their turn replaced the Hercynian range.

U7

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Henceforward we can and must break away from this view which
lacks depth. We have no longer the crawling ' sine ' curve, but
the spiral which springs upward as it turns. From one zoological
layer to another, something is carried over: it grows, jerkily, but
ceaselessly and in a constant direction. And this ' something ' is
what is most physically essential in the planet we live on. The
evolution of the simple bodies following the radio-active way,
the granitic segregation of continents, the possible isolation of the
interior layers of the globe many other transformations besides
the vital movement form no doubt a continuous bass underlying
the rhythms of the earth ; but since life separated out within the
heart of matter, these various processes have no longer the quality
or being the supreme event. With the birth of the first albumin-
oids, the essence of the terrestrial phenomenon shifted in a decisive
way to become concentrated in that seemingly negligible thick-
ness, the biosphere. The axis of geogenesis is now extended in
biogenesis, which in the end will express itself in psychogenesis.

From an inward point of view, constantly confirmed by
ever-increasing harmonies, the different objects of science become
visible in proper perspective and in their true proportions. We
see life at the head, with all physics subordinate to it. And at
the heart of life, explaining its progression, the impetus of a rise
of consciousness.

b. The Impetus of Life. This is a question hotly debated by
naturalists ever since die understanding of nature has been hinged
on the understanding of evolution. Faithful to their analytical
and determinist methods, biolgists persist in looking for the
principle of vita, developments in external stimuli or in statistics:
the struggle for survival, natural selection and so on. From this
point of view, the animate world could never advance — if it
advanced at all — otherwise than by the automatically regulated
sum of all the efforts it makes to remain itself.

Far be it from mc, let me say once again, to deny the im-
portant, indeed essential, role, played by this historic working
of the material forms. As living beings, we feel it in ourselves.
To jolt the individual out of his natural laziness and the rut of

148

DEMETER

habit, and also from time to time to break up the collective
frameworks in which he is imprisoned, it is indispensable that he
should be shaken and prodded from outside. What would we do
without our enemies ? While capable of supply regulating within
organic bodies the blind movement of molecules, life seems still
to exploit for its creative arrangements the vast reactions which
are born fortuitously throughout the world between material
currents and animate masses. Life seems to play as cleverly with
collectivities and events as with atoms. But what could this
ingeniousness and these stimulants do if applied to a funda-
mental inertia ? And what, moreover, as we have pointed out,
would the mechanical energies themselves be without some
within to feed them ? Beneath the ' tangential ' we find the
' radial '. The impetus of the world, glimpsed in the great
drive of consciousness, can only have its ultimate source in some
inner principle, which alone could explain its irreversible advance
towards higher psychisms.

How can life respect determinism on the without and yet
act in freedom within ? Perhaps we shall understand that better
some day.

Meanwhile the vital phenomenon seems on the whole both
natural and possible when once the reality of a fundamental
impetus has been accepted. Furthermore, its micro-structure
itself becomes clearer. For we now perceive a new way of
explaining, over and above the main stream of biological evolu-
tion, the progress and particular disposition of its various phyla. 1

1 In various quarters I shall be accused of showing too Lamarckian a bent in
the explanations which follow, of giving an exaggerated influence to the
Within in the organic arrangement of bodies. But be pleased to remember that,
in the ' morphogenctic ' action of instinct as here understood, an essential part
is left to the Darwinian play of external forces and to chance. It is only really
through strokes of chance that life proceeds, but strokes of chance which are
recognised and grasped — that is to say, psychically selected. Properly under-
stood the ' anti-chance ' of the Neo-Lamarckian is not the mere negation of
Darwinian chance. On the contrary it appears as its utilisation. There is a
functional complementariness between the two factors ; we could call it
' symbiosis '.

149

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

It is one tiling to notice that in a given line in the animal kingdom
limbs become solipedal or teeth carnivorous, and quite another
to guess how this tendency was produced. It is all very well to
say that a mutation occurs at the point where the stem leaves the
verticil. But what then ? The later modifications of the phylum
are as a rule so gradual, and so stable are sometimes the organs
affected, even from the embryo (the teeth, for example), that
we are definitely forced to abandon the idea of explaining every
case simply as the survival of the fittest, or as a mechanical
adaptation to environment and us. So what follows ?

The more often I come across this problem and the longer
I pore over it, the more firmly is it impressed upon me that in
fact we are confronted with an effect not of external forces but
of psychology. According to current thought, an animal develops
its carnivorous instincts because its molars become cutting and
its claws sharp. Should we not turn the proposition around ?
In other words if the tiger elongates its fangs and sharpens its
claws is it not rather because, following its line of descent, it
receives, develops and hands on the ' soul of a carnivore ' ? It
is the same with the timid cursorial types, the same with those
that burrow, swim or fly. There is an evolution of characters
certainly ; but on condition that this word is taken in the
sense of ' temperament '. At first sight the explanation reminds
one of the ' virtues ' of the Schoolmen. As wc go deeper, it
becomes increasingly likely. In the individual, qualities and
defects develop with age. Why (or rather, how) should they

It may be added that if wc give its proper place to the essential distinction
(still too often ignored) between a biology of small units and a biology of big
complexes— in the same way as there is a physics of the infinitesimal and another
of the immense— wc appreciate the advisability of distinguishing two major
zones of the organic world, and treating them differently. On the one hand is
the Lamarckian zone of very big complexes (above all, man) in which anti-
chance can be seen to dominate ; on the other hand the Darwinian zone of
small complexes, lower forms of life, m which anti-chance is so swamped by
chance that it can onjy be appreciated by reasoning and conjecture, that is to
say indirectly. (Sec p. 302.)

150

DEMETER

not be accentuated phylctically ? And why, on that scale, should
they not react upon the organism to stamp it with their image ?
After all the ants and termites succeed in fitting out their warriors
and their workers with an exterior suited to their instincts.
And we also surely know men of prey ?

c. Once we have admitted this, unexpected horizons rise up in
front of biology. For obvious practical reasons we are led to
make use of the variations in their fossihsablc parts to follow the
links between living creatures. But this practical necessity must
not be allowed to blind us to what is limited and superficial
in this arrangement. The number of bones, shape of teeth,
ornamentation of the integument — all these ' visible characters '
form merely the outward garment round something deeper
which supports it. We arc dealing with only one event, the
grand orthogenesis of everything living towards a higher degree
of immanent spontaneity. Secondarily, we find by periodical
dispersal of this impetus, the verticil of the little orthogeneses,
where the fundamental current splits up to form the true, inner
axis of each ' radiation '. Finally, thrown over all that like a
simple sheath, we iind the veil of tissues and the architecture of
the limbs. That is the situation.

To write the true natural history of the world, we should
need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear
no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types re-
placing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading
out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the
living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh
and bone. From the biosphere to the species is nothing but an im-
mense ramification of psychism seeking for itself through
different forms. That is where Ariadne's thread leads us if we
follow it to the end.

In the present state of our knowledge, of course, we cannot
dream of expressing the mechanism of evolution in this ' interior-
ised ', ' radial ' form. On the other hand, one thing becomes
clear. It is that, if this is the real significance of transformisni,
life, in so far as it represents a controlled process, could only proceed

151

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

ever farther along its original line on condition that it underwent
some profound readjustment at a given moment.

The law is formal. We referred to it before, when we spoke
of the birth of life. No reality in the world can go on increasing
without sooner or later reaching a critical point involving some
change of state. There is a ceiling limit to speeds and tempera-
tures. If we increase the acceleration of a body until we get
near the speed of light, it acquires by excess of mass an infinitely
inert nature. If we heat it, it would first melt, then vaporise.
And the same applies to all known physical properties. So long
as we could regard evolution as a simple advance towards com-
plexity, we could imagine it developing indefinitely in its own
likeness ; there is no ceiling limit to pure diversification. Now
that, beneath the historically increasing intricacy of forms and
organs, we have discovered the irreversible increase, not only
in quantity but also in quality, of brains (and therefore conscious-
ness) we are forced to realise that an event of another order —
a metamorphosis — was inevitably awaited to wind up this long
period of synthesis in the course of geological time.

We must now turn our attention to the first symptoms of
this great terrestrial phenomenon which ends up in man.

3. THE APPROACH OF TIME

Let us return to the wave of life in movement where we left it,
i.e. at the expansion of the mammals or, to situate ourselves
concretely in duration, let us go back to the world as we can
imagine it towards the end of the Tertiary period.

A great calm seems to be reigning on the surface of the earth
at this time. From South Africa to South America, across
Europe and Asia, are fertile steppes and dense forests. Then
other steppes and other forests. And amongst this endless verdure
are myriads of antelopes and zebras, a variety of proboscidians
in herds, deer with every kind of antler, tigers, wolves, foxes
and badgers, all similar to those we have today. In short, the

152

DEMETER

landscape is not too dissimilar from that which we are today
seeking to preserve in National Parks — on the Zambesi, in the
Congo, or in Arizona. Except for a few lingering archaic forms,
so familiar is this scene that we have to make an effort to realise
that nowhere is there so much as a wisp of smoke rising from
camp or village.

It is a period of calm profusion. The mammalian layer has
spread out. Yet evolution cannot be stopped. Something, some-
where, is unquestionably accumulating and ready to rise up for
another forward leap. But what ? and where ?

To detect what at this moment is maturing in the womb of
the universal mother, let us make use of the index which we
have henceforward at our disposal. Life is the rise of conscious-
ness, we have agreed. If it is to progress still further it can only
be because, here and there, the internal energy is secretly rising
up under the mantle of the flowering earth. Here and there,
within nervous systems, psychic tension is doubtless increasing.
Physicists and doctors use delicate instruments on bodies :
let us do likewise, applying our ' thermometer ' of consciousness
to this somnolent nature. In what region of the biosphere in the
Pliocene period is there a sign of rising temperature ?

Of course we must look at heads.

Outside the vegetable kingdom, which does not count, 1 there
are two summits of branches, and only two, which emerge
before us in air, light and spontaneity : on the arthropod side,
the insects ; on the vertebrate side, the mammals. To which
side belongs the future — and truth ?

a. The Insects. In trie higher insects a cephalic concentration of
nerve ganglions goes hand in hand with an extraordinary wealth

1 In the sense that in the vegetable kingdom we are unable to follow along a
nervous system the evolution of a psychism obviously remaining diffuse.
That is not to say that the latter does not exist, growing in its own manner.
I would not think of denying it. Indeed, to take one example out of a thousand,
is it not enough to see how certain plants trap insects to be convinced that the
vegetable branch, albeit from afar, is like the other two, subservient to the rise
of consciousness.

IS3

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

and precision of behaviour. Wc cannot but wonder when wc
see living around us this world so marvellously adjusted and yet
so terribly far away. Our rivals ? Our successors, perhaps ?
Must we not rather say a multitude pathetically involved and
struggling in a blind alley ?

What seems to eliminate the hypothesis that the insects
represent the issue — or even that they simply are an issue — for
evolution is the fact that although very much the elders of the
higher vertebrates by the date of their florescence, and now they
seem irremediably ' stationary \ Throughout what may well be
geological ages, they have become endlessly complicated like
Chinese characters, yet give the impression of being unable to
change their plan — as if their impetus or fundamental meta-
morphosis were stopped. And if we reflect a moment, wc can
see certain reasons for this marking-time.

First of all insects are too small. For quantitative develop-
ment of the organs, an external, chitinous skeleton is a bad solu-
tion. In spite of repeated moultings it imprisons the organs :
and it quickly yields under increasing interior volumes. The
insect cannot grow beyond an inch or two without becoming
dangerously fragile. In spite of the disdain with which we some-
times regard ' a mere question of size ', it is undeniable that
certain qualities, by the very fact that they are linked to a material
synthesis, are only capable of being manifested above certain
quantities. The superior psychic levels demand physically big
brains.

And then, precisely perhaps for this very reason of size,
insects show a strange psychic inferiority in the very domain
where we should have been tempted to put their superiority.
Our own cleverness is dumbfounded by the precision of their
movements and their constructions. But we must be careful.
Looked at more closely, this perfection is conditioned by the
extreme rapidity with which their psychology becomes mechan-
ised and hardened. It has been amply demonstrated that the
insect disposes of an appreciable margin of indetermination and
choice for its operations. Only, hardly are these performed,

154

DEMBTER

than its acts seem to become charged with habit and soon trans-
formed into organic reflexes. Automatically and continually,
one could say, its consciousness is extravcrted to become frozen
at once : (i) in its behaviour, which successive corrections
promptly registered render ever more precise and (ii) in the long
run, in a somatic morphology in which individual particularities
disappear, absorbed by function. Hence those adjustments of
organs and behaviour at which Fabre rightly marvelled, and
hence also the simply prodigious arrangements which group
together in a single living machine the swarming hive or ant-hill.

This could be called a paroxysm of consciousness, which
spreads outwards from within, to become materialised in rigid
arrangements. The exact opposite of a concentration.
b. The Mammals. Let us therefore leave the insects and return
to the mammals.

At once we feel at ease ; so much at ease that our relief could
be accounted for by an impression of ' anthropoccntrism '.
If we breathe more freely now that we have come away from
the hive and ant-hill, is it not quite simply because, amongst
the higher vertebrates, we feel ' at home ' ? There is always the
menace of relativity hanging over our minds.

No, we are not making a mistake. In this case at least we
are not misled by an impression — our judgment is really being
guided by our intelligence, with the power it has to appreciate
certain absolute values. If a furry quadruped seems so ' animated '
compared with an ant, so genuinely alive, it is not only because
of a zoological kinship we have with it. In the behaviour of a
cat, a dog, a dolphin, there is such suppleness, such unexpected-
ness, such exuberance of life and curiosity ! Instinct is no longer
narrowly canalised, as in the spider or the bee, paralysed in a
single function. Individually and socially it remains flexible. It
takes interest, it flutters, it plays. We are dealing with an entirely
different form of instinct in fact, and one not subject to the limita-
tions imposed upon the tool by the precision it has attained. Unlike
the insect, the mammal is no longer completely the slave of the
phylum it belongs to. Around it an ' aura ' of freedom begins

155

PLIOCENE
MIOCENE

OLIGOCENE

Anthropoids

EOCENE

.J. S Z A\ - ~

diagram 3. The development of the Primates.

DEMETER

to float, a glimmer of personality. And it is in that direction that
the possibilities presently crop up, intcrminate and interminable,
straight ahead.

But from what species was it that the leap forward towards
promised horizons was to take place ?

Let us take a closer look at the great horde of Pliocene animals
— those limbs developed to the last degree of simplicity and
perfection, those forests of antlers on the heads of stags, of lyre-
shaped horns on the starred or striped foreheads of antelopes,
those heavy tusks on the snouts of the proboscidians, those
canines and incisors of the great carnivores . . . Surely such
luxuriance, such achievement, must precisely serve to condemn
the future of these magnificent creatures, marking them for an
early death, writing them off — despite their psychic vitality —
as forms that have got into a morphological dead end. All this
may seem rather more like an end than a beginning.

This is doubtless so. But besides the Polycladida, the Strep-
sicerata, the elephants, the sabre-toothed tigers, and so many
others, there are the primates.

c. The Primates. So far I have only mentioned the primates
once or twice in passing. I have not yet allotted a place to these
near neighbours of ours on the tree of life. The omission was
deliberavC. At the point I had then reached, their importance
had not yet come to light ; they could not have been understood.
Now that we have perceived the secret spring that moves
zoological evo.ution, it is different. Their hour has come, and
we see how they can and should make their entrance at that
fateful moment towards the end of the Tertiary era.

On the whole, like all other animal groups, the primates
appear morphologically as a series of overlapping verticils or
ramifications, and, as usual, the terminals are sharply defined,
the stems blurred (Diag. 3). At the top we have on either side
the two great branches of the monkeys proper : the Catarrhines,
true monkeys of the old world with 32 teeth ; and the Platyrr-
hines of South America, with flattened nose and 36 teeth. Below,
the lemurs, generally with an elongated snout and often pro-

157

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

clivous incisors. Right at the bottom these two-tiered verticils
seem to break off at the beginning of the Tertiary era from an
' insectivorous ' ramification, the Tupaioids, of which they seem
to represent a single radiation in a state of florescence. Nor is that
all. At the heart of each of these two verticils we can distinguish
a central sub-verticil of particularly ' cephalised ' forms. On
the lemurian side, the Tarsioids, tiny jumping animals with a
round, bulging cranium and huge eyes, whose sole living repre-
sentative, the tarsier of Malaya, reminds us bizarrely of a little
man. On the side of the Catarrhines we are all familiar with
anthropoids (the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang and
the gibbon), tailless monkeys, the biggest and most alert of all
monkeys.

The lemurs and the tarsiers were the first to reach their
prime — towards the end of the Eocene age. As for the anthro-
poids, we find them in Africa from the Oligocene onwards.
But they certainly did not reach their maximum diversity and
size until the end of the Pliocene. Then we find them in both
Africa and India, i.e. always in tropical or sub-tropical zones.
We should keep in mind this date and this mode of distribution
for they contain a lesson.

With that, we have placed the primates outwardly — both in
duration and in their external form. We should now penetrate
to the within of things and try to understand in what respect
these animals differ from the others, seen from inside.

What at once catches the anatomist's attention when he
looks at monkeys (particularly the higher ones) is the aston-
ishingly slight degree of differentiation in their bones. The
cranial capacity is relatively much bigger than in any other
mammal, but what are we to say of the rest ? An isolated molar
belonging to a Dryopithecus or a chimpanzee could readily be
confused with the tooth of an Eocene omnivore such as the
Condylarths. Then the limbs — with their radiations still intact
these exhibit the same plan and proportions that they had in the
first tetrapods of the Palaeozoic era. In the course of the Tertiary
era, the ungulates radically transformed the adjustment of their

158

DBMETER

feet ; the carnivores reduced and sharpened their teeth ; the
Cetacea streamlined themselves like fish ; the Proboscidea
gready complicated their incisors and their molars. Meanwhile
the primates on their side had kept their ulna intact and also their
fibula ; they jealously hung on to their five fingers ; they
remained typically tritubercular. Are we to consider them
therefore the conservatives among mammals, the most con-
servative of all ?

No ; but they have shown themselves to be the most wary.

In itself, at its best, the differentiation of an organ is an
immediate factor of superiority. But, because it is irreversible,
it also imprisons the animal that undergoes it in a restricted
path at the end of which, under the pressure of orthogenesis,
it runs the risk of ending up either in monstrosity or in fragility.
Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology
is littered with such catastrophes. Because, right up to the
Pliocene period, the primates remained the most ' primitive '
of the mammals as regards their limbs, they remained also the
most free. And what did they do with that freedom ? They
used it to lift themselves dirough successive upthrusts to the
very frontiers of intelligence.

So we have now before us, simultaneously with the true
definition of the primate, the answer to the problem which led
us to study the primates. ' After the mammals, at the end of
the Tertiary era, where will life be able to carry on ? '

What makes the primates so interesting and important to
biology is, in the first place, that they represent a phylum of
pure and direct cerebralisation. In the other mammals too, no
doubt, the nervous system and instinct gradually develop. But
in them the internal travail was distracted, limited and finally
arrested by accessory differentiations. Pari Passu with their
psychical development, horse, stag and tiger became, like the
insect, to some extent prisoners of the instruments of their swift-
moving or predatory ways. For that is what their limbs and teeth
had become. In the case of the primates, on the other hand,
evolution went straight to work on the brain, neglecting evcry-

159

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

thing eke, which accordingly remained malleable. That is why

they are at the head of the upward and onward march towards

greater consciousness. In this singular and privileged case, the

particular orthogenesis of the phylum happened to coincide exactly with

the principal orthogenesis of life itselj : following Osborn's term

which I shall borrow while changing its sense, it is ' aristogenesis ' book three

— and thus unlimited.

Hence this fust conclusion that if the mammals form a THOUGHT

dominant branch, the dominant branch of the tree of life, the
primates (i.e. the cerebro-manuals) are its leading shoot, and the
anthropoids are the bud in which this shoot ends up.

Thenceforward, it may be added, it is easy to decide where
to look in all the biosphere to see signs of what is to be expected.
We already knew that everywhere the active phyletic lines
grow warm with consciousness towards the summit. But in
one well-marked region at the heart of the mammals, where
the most powerful brains ever made by nature are to be found,
they become red hot. And right at the heart of that glow burns
a point of incandescence.

We must not lose sight of that line crimsoned by the dawn.
After thousands of years rising below the horizon, a flame bursts
forth at a stricdy localised point.

Thought is born.

1 60

CHAPTER ONE

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

Preliminary Remark : The Human Paradox

From a purely positivist point of view man is the most mys-
terious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
In fact we may as well admit that science has not yet found a
place for him in its representations of the universe. Physics
has succeeded in provisionally circumscribing the world of the
atom. Biology has been able to impose some sort of order on
the constructions of life. Supported both by physics and biology,
anthropology in its turn docs its best to explain the structure of
the human body and some of its physiological mechanisms.
But when all these features are put together, the portrait mani-
festly falls short of the reality. Man, as science is able to recon-
struct him today, is an animal like the others — so little separable
anatomically from the anthropoids that the modern classifications
made by zoologists return to the position of Linnaeus and include
him with them in the same super-family, the hominidae. Yet,
to judge by the biological results of his advent, is he not in
reality something altogether different ?

Morphologically the leap was extremely slight, yet it was
the concomitant of an incredible commotion among the spheres
of life — there lies the whole human paradox ; and there, in the
same breath, is the evidence that science, in its present-day
reconstructions of the world, neglects an essential factor, or
rather, an entire dimension of the universe.

In conformity with the general hypothesis which throughout

163

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

this book has been leading us towards a coherent and expressive
interpretation of the earth as it appears today > I want to show
now, in this part devoted to thought, that, to give man his
natural position in the world of experience, it is necessary and
sufficient to consider the within as well as the without of things.
This method has already enabled us to appreciate the grandeur
and the direction of the movement of life ; and this method
will serve once again to reconcile in our eyes the insignificance
and the supreme importance of the phenomenon of man in an
order that harmoniously re-descends on life and matter.

Between the last strata of the Pliocene period, in which man is
absent, and the next, in which the geologist is dumbfounded
to find the first chipped flints, what has happened ? And what
is the true measure of this leap ?

It is our task to divine and to measure the answers to these
questions before we follow step by step the march of mankind
right down to the decisive stage in which it is involved today.

i. THE THRESHOLD OF REFLECTION

A. The Threshold of the Element : the Hominisation 1
the Individual

of

a. Nature. Biologists are not yet agreed on whether or not
there is a direction (still less a definite axis )of evolution ; nor
is there any greater agreement among psychologists, and for a
connected reason, as to whether the human psychism differs
specifically (by ' nature ') from that of man's predecessors or
not. As a matter of fact the majority of ' scientists ' would tend
to contest the validity of such a breach of continuity. So much
has been said, and is still said, about the intelligence of animals.

If wc wish to settle this question of the ' superiority ' of man
over the animals (and it is every bit as necessary to settle it for
the sake of the ethics of life as well as for pure knowledge) I can
1 [French : hominisation — a word coined by the author.]

164

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

only see one way of doing so — to brush resolutely aside all those
secondary and equivocal manifestations of inner activity in human
behaviour, making straight for the central phenomenon, reflection.

From our experimental point of view, reflection is, as the
word indicates, the power acquired by a consciousness to turn
in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed
with its own particular consistence and value : no longer merely
to know, but to know oneself ; no longer merely to know,
but to know that one knows. 1 By this individualisation of him-
self in the depths of himself, the living element, which heretofore
had been spread out and divided over a diffuse circle of per-
ceptions and activites, was constituted for the first time as a
centre in die form of a point at which all the impressions and
experiences knit themselves together and fuse into a unity that
is conscious of its own organisation.

Now the consequences of such a transformation are immense,
visible as clearly in nature as any of the facts recorded by physics
or astronomy. The being who is the object of his own reflection,
in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes
in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality,
another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and
inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time,
anxieties and dreams of love — all these activities of inner life
are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed
centre as it explodes onto itself.

This said, I have a question to ask. If, as follows from the
foregoing, it is the fact of being ' reflective ' which constitutes
the strictly ' intelligent ' being, can we seriously doubt that
intelligence is the evolutionary lot proper to man and to man
only ? If not, can we, under the influence of some false modesty,
hesitate to admit that man's possession of it constitutes a radical
advance on all forms of life that have gone before him ? Admit-
tedly the animal knows, but it cannot know that it knows : that
is quite certain. If it could, it would long ago have multiplied

1 [frlott plus seulement connaitre, mais se connaitre; non plus seulement savoir,
mais savoir que I'on sait.]

165

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

its inventions and developed a system of internal constructions
that could not have escaped our observation. In consequence
it is denied access to a whole domain of reality in which we can
move freely. We are separated by a chasm — or a threshold—
which it cannot cross. Because we are reflective we are not only
different but quite other. It is not merely a matter of change of
degree, but of a change of nature, resulting from a change of

state.

So we find ourselves confronted with exactly what we
expected at the end of the chapter we called Demeter. Life,
being an ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance
indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth.
It had, we said, like all growing realities in the world, to become
different so as to remain itself. Here, in the accession to the power
of reflection, emerges (more clearly recognisable than in the
obscure primordial psychism of the first cells) the particular and
critical form of transformation in which this surcreation or
rebirth consisted for it. And at the same moment we find the
whole curve of biogenesis reappearing summed up and clarified
in this singular point.

b. Theoretical Mechanism. All along, naturalists and philosophers
have held opinions of the utmost divergence concerning the
' psychical ' make-up of animals. For the early Schoolmen instinct
was a sort of sub-intelligence, homogeneous and fixed, marking
one of the ontological and logical stages by which being grades
downwards from pure spirit to pure materiality. For the
Cartesian only thought existed : so the animal, devoid of any
within, was a mere automaton. For most modern biologists,
as I have said already, there is no sharp line to be drawn between
instinct and thought, neither being very much more than a
sort of luminous halo enveloping the play — the only essential
thing — of the determinisms of matter.

In each of these varying opinions there is an element of
truth, but also a cause of error which becomes apparent when,
foDowing the point of view put forward in these pages, we make
up our minds to recognise (i) that instinct, far from being an

166

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

epiphenomenon, translates through its different expressions the
very phenomenon of life, and (2) that it consequently represents a
variable dimension.

What exactly happens if we look at nature from this angle ?

Firstly we realise better in our minds the fact and the reason
for the diversity of animal behaviour. From the moment we
regard evolution as primarily psychical transformation, we see
there is not one instinct in nature, but a multitude of forms of
instincts each corresponding to a particular solution of the
problem of life. The ' psychical ' make-up of an insect is not and
cannot be that of a vertebrate ; nor can the instinct of a squirrel be
that of a cat or an elephant : this in virtue of the position of each
on the tree of life.

By the fact itself, in this variety, we begin to see legitimately
a relief stand out and a gradation formed. If instinct is a variable
dimension, the instincts will not only be different ; they constitute
beneath their complexity, a growing system. They form as a
whole a kind of fan-like structure in which the higher terms
on each nervure are recognised each time by a greater range of
choice and depending on a better denned centre of co-ordination
and consciousness. And that is the very thing we see. The
mind (or psyche) of a dog, despite all that may be said to the
contrary, is positively superior to that of a mole or a fish. 1

This being said, and I am merely presenting in a different
light what has already been revealed in our study of life, the
upholders of the spiritual explanation have no need to be dis-
concerted when they see, or are obliged to see, in the higher
animals (particularly in the great apes) ways and reactions which
strangely recall those of which they make use to define the
1 From this point of view it could be said that every form of instinct tends
in its own way to become ' intelligence ' ; but it is only in the human line
that (for extrinsic or intrinsic reasons) the operation has been successful all the
■way. Having reached the stage of reflection, man would thus represent a single
one of the innumerable modalities of consciousness tried out by life in the
animal world. In all those other psychological worlds it is very difficult for
us to enter, not only because in them knowledge is more confused, but because
they work differently from ours.

167

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

nature and prove the presence in man of ' a reasonable soul '. If
the story of life is no more than a movement of consciousness
veiled by morphology, it is inevitable that, towards the summit of
the series, in the proximity of man, the ' psychical ' make-ups seem
to reach the borders of intelligence. And that is exactly what happens.

Hence light is thrown on the ' human paradox ' itself. We
are disturbed to notice how little ' anthropos ' differs anatomi-
cally from the other anthropoids, despite his incontestable mental
pre-eminence in certain respects — so disturbed that we feel almost
ready to abandon the attempt to distinguish them, at least
towards their point of origin. But is not this extraordinary
resemblance precisely what had to be ?

When water is heated to boiling point under normal pressure,
and one goes on heating it, the first thing that follows — without
change of temperature — is a tumultuous expansion of freed and
vaporised molecules. Or, taking a series of sections trom the
base towards the summit of a cone, their area decreases con-
stantly ; then suddenly, with another infinitesimal displacement,
the surface vanishes leaving us with a point. Thus by these remote
comparisons we are able to imagine the mechanism involved in
the critical threshold of reflection.

By the end of the Tertiary era, the psychical temperature in
the cellular world had been rising for more than 500 million
years. From branch to branch, from layer to layer, we have seen
how nervous systems followed pari passu the process of increased
complication and concentration. Finally, with the primates, an
instrument was fashioned so remarkably supple and rich that the
step immediately following could not take place without the
whole animal psychism being as it were recast and consolidated
on itself. Now this movement did not stop, for there was
nothing in the structure of the organism to prevent it advancing.
When the anthropoid, so to speak, had been brought ' mentally '
to boiling point some further calories were added. Or, when the
anthropoid had almost reached the summit of the cone, a final
effort took place along the axis. No more was needed for the
whole inner equilibrium to be upset. What was previously only

168

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

a centred surface became a centre. By a tiny ' tangential ' in-
crease, the ' radial ' was turned back on itself and so to speak
took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the
organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken
place : consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of
super-sensory relationships and representations ; and simultane-
ously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the con-
centrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for
the first time. 1

Those who adopt the spiritual explanation are right when
they defend so vehemently a certain transcendence of man over
the rest of nature. But neither are the materialists wrong when
they maintain that man is just one further term in a series of
animal forms. Here, as in so many cases, the two antithetical
kinds of evidences are resolved in a movement — provided that
in this movement we emphasise the highly natural phenomenon
of the ' change of state '. From the cell to the thinking animal,
as from the atom to the cell, a single process (a psychical kindling
or concentration) goes on without interruption and always in the
same direction. But by virtue of this permanence in the opera-
tion, it is inevitable from the point of view of physics that certain
leaps suddenly transform the subject of the operation.
c. Realisation. Discontinuity in continuity : that is how, in the
theory of its mechanism, the birth of thought, like that of life,
presents itself and defines itself.

1 Need I repeat that 1 confine myself here to the phenomena, i.e. to the
experimental relations between consciousness and complexity, without pre-
judging the deeper causes which govern the whole issue ? In virtue of the limi-
tations imposed on our sensory knowledge by the play of the temporo-spatial
series, it is only, it seems, under the appearances of a critical point that we can
grasp experimentally the ' hominising ' (spiritualising) step to reflection. But,
with that said, there is nothing to prevent the thinker who adopts a spiritual
explanation from positing (for reasons of a higher order and at a later stage of
his dialectic), under the phenomenal veil of a revolutionary transformation,
whatever ' creative ' operation or ' special intervention ' he likes (see Prefatory
Note). Is it not a principle universally accepted by Christian thought in its
theological interpretation of reality that for our minds there arc different and
successive planes of knowledge?

169

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

But how has the mechanism worked in its concrete reality ?
Had there been a witness to the crisis, what would have been
externally visible to him of the metamorphosis ?

As I shall be saying later on, when I come to deal with the
' primaeval forms of man ', this picture we are so eager to paint
will probably, like the origin of life, remain for ever beyond
our grasp — and for the same reasons. The most we have to
guide us here is the resource of thinking of the awakening of
intelligence in the child in the course of ontogeny. Two remarks
deserve, however, to be made, the one circumscribing, the other
still further deepening, the mystery which veils this singular
point from our imagination.

The first is that to culminate in man at the stage of reflection,
life must have been preparing a whole group of factors for a long
time and simultaneously — though nothing at first sight could
have given grounds for supposing that they would be linked
together ' providentially '.

It is true that in the end, from the organic point of view, the
whole metamorphosis leading to man depends on die question
of a better brain. But how was this cerebral perfectioning to be
carried out — how could it have worked — if there had not been a
whole series of other conditions realised at just the same time ?
If the creature from which man issued had not been a biped,
his hands would not have been free in time to release the jaws
from their prehensile function, and the thick band of maxillary
muscles which had imprisoned the cranium could not have been
relaxed. It is thanks to two-footedness freeing the hands that the
brain was able to grow ; and thanks to this, too, that the eyes,
brought closer together on the diminished face, were able to
converge and fix on what the hands held and brought before
them — the very gesture which formed the external counterpart
of reflection. In itself this marvellous conjunction should not
surprise us. Surely the smallest thing formed in the world is
always the result of the most formidable coincidence — a knot
whose strands have been for all time converging from the four
corners of space. Life docs not work by following a single thread,

170

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

nor yet by fits and starts. It pushes forward its whole network at
one and the same time. So is the embryo fashioned in the womb
that bears it. This we have reason to know, but it is satisfying to
us precisely to recognise that man was born under the same
maternal law. And we are happy to admit that the birth of
intelligence corresponds to a turning in upon itself, not only of
the nervous system, but of the whole being. What at first sight
disconcerts us, on the other hand, is the need to accept that this
step could only be achieved at one single stroke.

For that is to be my second remark, a remark I cannot avoid.
In the case of human ontogeny we can slur over the question
at what moment the new-born child may be said to achieve
intelligence and become a thinking being, for we find a con-
tinuous series of states happening in the same individual from
the fertilised ovum to the adult. What does it matter whether
there is a hiatus or where it might be ? It is quite different in the
case of a phyletic embryogenesis in which each stage or each
state is represented by a different being, and it is impossible (at any
rate within the scope of modern methods of thought) to evade
the problem of discontinuity. If the threshold of reflection is
really (as its physical nature seems to require, and as we have
ourselves admitted) a critical transformation, a mutation from
zero to everything, it is impossible for us to imagine an inter-
mediary individual at this precise level. Either this being has not
yet reached, or it has already got beyond, this change of state.
Look at it as we will, we cannot avoid the alternative — either
thought is made unthinkable by a denial of its psychical trans-
cendence over instinct, or we are forced to admit that it appeared
between two individuals.

The terms of this proposition are disconcerting, but they
become less bizarre, and even inoffensive, if we observe that,
speaking strictly as scientists, we may suppose that intelligence
might (or even must) have been as little visible externally at its
phyletic origin as it is today to our eyes in every new-born
child at the ontogenetical stage: in which case every tangible
subject of debate between the observer and the theorist disappears.

171

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

To say nothing of the fact (see the second form of the ' un-
graspable' in the footnote on p. 186) that any sort of scientific
discussion today on the outward and visible signs of the first
emergence of reflection on the earth (even supposing there had
been a spectator there to see them) is quite impossible ; because,
here if anywhere, we find ourselves in the presence of one of those
beginnings (' infinitely small quantities in evolution ') automati-
cally and irremediably removed from our range of vision by a
thick layer of the past (see Note, p. 122).

Without trying to picture the unimaginable, let us therefore
keep hold of one idea— that the access to thought represents a
threshold which had to be crossed at a single stride ; a ' trans-
experimental ' interval about which scientifically we can say
nothing, but beyond which we find ourselves transported onto
an entirely new biological plane.

d. Prolongation. It is only at this point that we can fully see the
nature of the transit to reflection. In the first place it involved
a change of state ; then, by this very fact, the beginning of
another kind of life — precisely that interior life of which I have
spoken above. A moment ago we compared the simplicity of
the thinking mind with that of a geometrical point. It would
have been better to speak of a line or an axis. Where intelligence
is concerned, ' to be posited ' does not mean ' to be achieved '.
As soon as a child is born, it must breathe or it will die. Similarly
the reflective psychic centre, once turned in upon itself, can
only subsist by means of a double movement which is in reality
one and the same. It centres itself further on itself by pene-
tration into a new space, and at the same time it centres the rest
of the world around itself by the establishment of an ever more
coherent and better organised perspective in the realities which
surround it. We are not dealing with an immutably fixed focus
but with a vortex which grows deeper as it sucks up the fluid
at the heart of which it was born. The ego only persists by becom-
ing ever more itself, in the measure in which it makes everything
else itself. So man becomes a person in and through personalisation.
Obviously by the effect of such a transformation the entire

172

THE BIRTH OP THOUGHT

structure of life is modified. Up to this point the animated
element was so narrowly subject to the phylum that its own
individuality could be regarded as accessory and sacrificed. It
received, maintained, acquired if possible, reproduced and trans-
mitted. And so on ceaselessly and indefinitely. Caught up
in the chain of succeeding generations, the animal seemed to
lack the right to live ; it appeared to have no value for itself. It
was a fugitive foothold for a process which passed over it and
ignored it. Life, once again, was more real than living things.

With the advent of the power of reflection (an essentially
elemental property, at any rate to begin with) everything is
changed, and we now perceive that under the more striking
reality of the collective transformations a secret progress has
been going on parallel to individualisation. The more highly
each phylum became charged with psychism, the more it tended
to ' granulate '. The animal grew in value in relation to the
speci2S. Finally at the level of man the phenomenon gathers new
power and takes definitive shape. With the ' person ', endowed
by ' personalisation ' with an indefinite power of elemental
evolution, the branch ceases to bear, as an anonymous whole,
the exclusive promises for the future. The cell has become
' someone '. After the grain of matter, the grain of life ; and
now at last we see constituted the^rai'n oj thought.

Does that mean that the phylum loses its function from this
moment and vanishes in thin air, like those animals who lose
their identity in a veritable dust of spores which they give birth
to in dying ? Above the point of reflection, does the whole
interest of evolution shift, passing from life into a plurality of
isolated living beings ?

Nothing of the sort. Only, from this crucial date the global
spurt, without slackening in the slightest, has acquired another
degree, another order of complexity. The phylum does not
break like a fragile jet just because henceforward it is fraught
with thinking centres ; it does not crumble into its elementary
psychisms. On the contrary it is reinforced by an inner lining,
an additional framework. Until now it was enough to consider

173

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

in nature a simple vibration on a wide front, the ascent of
individual centres of consciousness. What we now have to do is to
define and regulate harmoniously an ascent of consciousnesses (a
much more delicate phenomenon). We are dealing with a pro-
gress made up of other progresses as lasting as itself ; a movement
of movements.

Let us try to lift our minds high enough to dominate the
problem. For that, let us forget for a moment die particular
destiny of the spiritual elements engaged in the general trans-
formation. It is, in point of fact, only by following the ascension
and spread of the whole in its main lines that we are able, after
a long detour, to determine the part reserved for individual hopes
in the total success.

We thus reach the personalisation of the individual by the
' hominisation ' of the whole group.

b. The Threshold of the Phylum : the Hominisation of the Species

Thus, through this leap of intelligence, whose nature and
mechanism we have been analysing in the thinking particle,
life continues in some way to spread as though nothing had
happened. According to all appearances, propagation, multi-
plication and ramification went on in man, as in other animals,
after the threshold of thought, as busily as before. Nothing, one
might think, had altered in the current. But the water in it was
no longer the same. Like a river enriched by contact with an
alluvial plain, the vital flux, as it crossed the stages of reflection,
was charged with new principles, and as a result manifested new
activities. From now onwards it was not merely animated
grains which the pressure of evolution pumped up the living
stem, but grains of thought. What was to happen under this
influence to the colour or the shape of the leaves, the flowers,
the fruit ?

I would be anticipating later developments of our argument
if I gave a detailed and considered answer to this question now.

174

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

But it would be as well to indicate at once three particularities
which manifest themselves in any and every operation or pro-
duction of the species from the moment the threshold of thought
is crossed. One concerns the composition of new branches,
another the general direction of their growth, the third their
relations to and differences from — taken as a whole — what had
flourished earlier on the tree of life.

a. The composition of the human branches. Whatever idea we have
about the inner mechanism of evolution, there is no denying
that each zoological group is enclosed in a certain psychological
envelope. We have already said that each type of insect, bird or
mammal has its own instincts. So far no attempt has been made
to link together systematically the two elements, namely the
somatic and psychic, of the species. There are naturalists who
describe and classify shapes, and others who specialise in the study
of behaviour. In fact, below man, purely morphological criteria
provide a perfectly adequate framework for studying the dis-
tribution of species. But from the advent of man difficulties
appear. We cannot fail to be aware of the extreme confusion
which prevails concerning the significance and the distribution
of the extremely varied groups into which mankind divides up
under our very eyes — races, nations, states, countries, cultures,
etc. In these diverse and constantly shifting categories, people as
a rule only care to see heterogeneous units — some natural (race),
others artificial (nations) — overlapping irregularly on different
planes.

It is an unpleasing and unnecessary irregularity, and one
which vanishes as soon as we give its proper place to the within
as well as to the without of things.

Indeed, from this more comprehensive point of view, the
composition of the human group with its branches, however
confused it may appear, can be reduced nevertheless to the
general rules of biology. But, by the exaggeration of a variable
that had remained negligible in the animals, it simply brings
out the dual nature of those rules or even, on the contrary — if
what is somatic is woven by the psyche — their fundamental

I7S

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

unity. This is not an exception but a generalisation. It is impos-
sible to remain long in doubt : in the world become human
it is always the zoological ramification which, in spite of all
appearances and all complexities, pushes onwards and operates
according to the same mechanism as before. Only, as a result
of the quantity of inner energy liberated by reflection, the
operation then tends to emerge from the material organs so as
to formulate itself also or even above all in the mind. What is
spontaneously psychical is no longer merely an aura round the
' soma '. It becomes an appreciable part, or even a principal
part, of the phenomenon. And because variations of soul are
much richer and more subtle than the often imperceptible organic
changes which accompany them, it is obvious that the mere
inspection of bones or integuments will not suffice to explain
or to catalogue the progresses of the total zoological differentia-
tion. That is how things stand. And the remedy faces us no less
clearly. To unravel the structure of a thinking phylum, anatomy
by itself is not enough : it must be backed up by psychology.

This is a laborious complication of course, since it becomes
clear that no satisfactory classification of the human ' genus '
will be forthcoming, save through the combined play of two
partially independent variable. But it is a fruitful complication,
for two reasons.

On the one hand, at the price of this difficulty, order and
homogeneity — that is to say, truth — come back into our per-
spectives of life extended to include man ; and, because we
realise correlatively the organic value of every social construction,
we feel already more inclined to treat it as a subject of science,
hence to respect it.

On the other hand, from the very fact that the fibres of the
human phylum appear surrounded by their psychic sheath,
we can begin to understand the extraordinary power of aggluti-
nation and coalescence that they show. Which brings us at the
same time on the track of the fundamental discovery with which
our study of the phenomenon of man is to culminate — the con-
vergence of the spirit.

176

THE BIRTH OP THOUGHT

b. The General Direction of Growth. So long as our perspectives
of the psychic nature of zoological evolution were based only
on the examination of animal lines and their nervous systems,
the direction of that evolution remained perforce as vague for
our knowledge as the soul itself of those distant relations of ours.
Consciousness rises through living beings : that was about all
we were able to say. But from the moment the threshold of
thought is crossed its progress becomes easier to unravel ; for
life has not only reached the rung on which we ourselves stand,
but begins to overflow freely by its free activity beyond the
boundary within which it had been confined by the exigences
of physiology. The message is more clearly written, and we
are better able to follow it, because we recognise ourselves in it.
Earlier, when we were discussing the tree of life, we noticed as
a fundamental character that brains grew bigger and became
more differentiated along each zoological stem. To define the ex-
tension and the counterpart of this law (after the transit to reflec-
tion) it will henceforth be sufficient to say : ' Following each
anthropological line, it is the human element that seeks itself and
grows.'

A moment ago I referred to the unparalleled complexity of
the human group — all those races, those nations, those states
whose entanglements defy the resourcefulness of anatomists and
ethnologists alike. There are so many rays in that spectrum that
we despair of analysing them. Let us try instead to perceive
what this multiplicity represents when viewed as a whole. If
we do this we will see that its disturbing aggregation is nothing
but a multitude of sequins all sending back to each other by
reflection the same light. We find hundreds or thousands of
facets, each expressing at a different angle a reality which seeks
itself among a world of groping forms. We are not astonished
(because it happens to us) to see in each person around us the
spark of reflection developing year by year. We are all conscious,
too, at all events vaguely, that something in our atmosphere is
changing with the course of history. If we add these two pieces
of evidence together (and rectify certain exaggerated views on

177 M

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

the purely ' germinal ' and passive nature of heredity), how is
it that we are not more sensitive to the presence of something
greater than ourselves moving forward within us and in our
midst ?

Up to the level of thought a question could still be asked of
the science of nature — the question about the evolutionary value
and transmission of acquired characters. As we know, the
biologist tended, and still tends, to be sceptical and evasive ; and
perhaps he is right, as regards the fixed zones of the body he likes
to confine himself to. But what happens if we give the psyche
its legitimate place in the integrity of living organisms ? Im-
mec'iitely, over the alleged independence of the phyletic ' germ-
plasm ', the individual activity of the ' soma ' reclaims its rights.
In the insects, for example, or the beaver, we see in the most
blatant way the existence of hereditarily-formed or even fixed
instincts underlying the play of animal spontaneities. From
reflection onwards, the reality of this mechanism becomes not
only manifest but preponderant. Under the free and ingenious
effort of successive intelligences, something (even in the absence of
any measurable variation of brain or cranium) irreversibly
accumulates, according to all the evidence, and is transmitted, at
least collectively by means of education, down the course of
ages. The point here is that this ' something ' — construction of
matter or construction of beauty, systems of thought or systems
of action— ends up always by translating itself into an augmenta-
tion of consciousness, and consciousness in its turn, as we now
know, is nothing less than the substance and heart of life in process
of evolution.

What can this mean except that, over and above this particular
phenomenon — the individual accession to reflection — science
has grounds for recognising another phenomenon of a reflective
nature co-extensive with the whole of mankind. Here as else-
where in the universe, the whole shows itself to be greater than the
simple sum of the elements of which it is formed. The human
individual does not exhaust in himself the vital potentialities of
his race. But following each strand known to anthropology

178

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

and sociology, we meet with a stream whereby a continuing
and transmissible tradition of reflection is established and allowed
to increase. So from individual men there springs the human
reality ; from human phylogenesis, the human stem. 1
c. Connections and Differences. That seen and accepted, under
what form should we expect the human stem to rise up ? Will
it, because it is a thinking stem, sever the fibres which attach it
to the past — and, at the summit of the vertebrate branch, will
it develop from new elements and according to a new plan, like
some neoplasm ? To imagine such a rupture would be, once
again, to misjudge and underestimate our own ' dimension '
as well as the organic unity of the world and the methods of
evolution. In a flower the sepals, petals, stamens and pistil arc
not leaves and they have probably never been leaves. Yet they
possess unmistakably in their attachments and their texture
everything that would have resulted in a leaf had they not been
formed under a new influence and a new destiny. Similarly,
with the human inflorescence, we can see transformed or under-
going transformation the vessels, the disposition, and even the
sap of the stalk upon which the inflorescence was born : not
only the individual structure of the organs and the interior
ramifications of the species, but even the tendencies and behaviour
of the * soul '.

In man, considered as a zoological group, everything is
extended simultaneously — sexual attraction, with the laws of
reproduction ; the inclination to struggle for survival, with the
competitions it involves; the need for nourishment, with the
accompanying taste for seizing and devouring ; curiosity, to
see, with its delight in investigation ; the attraction of joining
others to live in society. Each of these fibres traverses each
one of us, coming up from far below and stretching beyond
and above us. And each one of them has its story (no less true

1 [Even if the Lamarckian view of the heritability of acquired charac-
teristics is biologically vieux jeu, and decisively refuted, when we reach the
human level and have to reckon with history, culture etc., * transmission '
becomes ' tradition '. Sec M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Kegan Paul, 1958)].

179

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

than any other) to tell of the whole course of evolution —
evolution of love, evolution of war, evolution of research,
evolution of the social sense. But each one, just because it is
evolutionary, undergoes a metamorphosis as it crosses the
threshold of reflection. Beyond this point it is enriched by new
possibilities, new colours, new fertility. It is the same thing,
if you tike, but it is something quite different also — a figure that
has become transformed by a change of space and dimension, dis-
continuity superimposed upon continuity, mutation upon evolu-
tion.

In this supple inflection, in this harmonious recasting which
transfigures the whole grouping of vital antecedences, both
external and internal, we cannot fail to find precious confirma-
tion of what we had already guessed. When an object begins
to grow in one of its accessory parts, it is thrown out of equili-
brium and becomes deformed. To remain symmetrical and
beautiful a body must be modified simultaneously throughout,
in the direction of one of its principal axes. Reflection conserves
even while re-shaping all the lines of the phylum on which it
settles. There is no fortuitous excrescence of a parasitic energy.
Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the
essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.

To this grand process of sublimation it is fitting to apply
with all its force the word hominisation. Horninisation can be
accepted in the first place as the individual and instantaneous
leap from instinct to thought, but it is also, in a wider sense,
the progressive phyletic spiritualisation in human civilisation of
all the forces contained in the animal world.

Thus we are led — after having considered the element and
pictured the species — to contemplate the earth in its totality.

c. The Threshold of the Terrestrial Planet : the Noosphere

When compared to all the living verticils, die human phylum
is not like any other. But because the specific orthogenesis of

1 80

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

the primates (urging them towards increasing cerebralisation)
coincides with the axial orthogenesis of organised matter (urging
all living things towards a higher consciousness) man, appearing
at the heart of the primates, flourishes on the leading shoot of
zoological evolution. It was with this observation that we
rounded off our remarks on the state of the Pliocene world.

It is easy to see what privileged value that unique situation
will confer upon the transit to reflection.

' The biological change of state terminating in the awakening
of thought does not represent merely a critical point that the
individual or even the species must pass through. Vaster than
that, it affects life itself in its organic totality, and consequendy
it marks a transformation affecting the state of the entire planet.'

Such is the evidence — born of all the other testimony we have
gradually assembled and added together in the course of our
nquiry — which imposes itself irresistibly on both our logic and
observation.

We have been following the successive stages of the same
grand progression from the fluid contours of the early earth.
Beneath the pulsations of geo-chemistry, of geo-tectonics and
of geo-biology, we have detected one and the same fundamental
process, always recognisable — the one which was given material
form in the first cells and was continued in the construction of
nervous systems. We saw geogenesis promoted to biogenesis,
which turned out in the end to be nothing else than psycho-
genesis.

With and within the crisis of reflection, the next term in the
series manifests itself. Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it
effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher
function — the engendering and subsequent development of the
mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living
creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole
world took a pace forward.

As regards the choices and rep onsibili ties of our activity,
the consequences of this discovery are enormous. As regards
our understanding of the earth they are decisive.

181

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Geologists have for long agreed in admitting the zonal
composition of our planet. We have already spoken of the
barysphere, central and metallic, surrounded by the rocky
lithosphere that in turn is surrounded by the fluid layers of the
hydrosphere and the atmosphere. Since Suess, science has rightly
become accustomed to add another to these four concentric
layers, the living membrane composed of the fauna and flora of
the globe, the biosphere, so often mentioned in these pages, an
envelope as definitely universal as the other ' spheres ' and even
more definitely individualised than them. For, instead of repre-
senting a more or less vague grouping, it forms a single piece,
of the very tissue of the genetic relations which delineate the tree
of life.

The recognition and isolation of a new era in evolution, the
ear of noogenesis, obliges us to distinguish correlatively a support
proportionate to the operation — that is to say, yet another mem-
brane in the majestic assembly of telluric layers. A glow ripples
outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point
of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening
circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.
Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy
of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as
extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the
' thinking layer \ which, since its germination at the end of the
Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants
and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere
there is the noospherc.

With that it bursts upon us how utterly warped is every
classification of the living world (or, indirectly, every construc-
tion of the physical one) in which man only figures logically
as a genus or a new family. This is an error of perspective which
deforms and uncrowns the whole phenomenon of the universe.
To give man his true place in nature it is not enough to find
one more pigeon-hole in the edifice of our systematisation or
even an additional order or branch. With hominisation, in spite
of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the begin-

182

THE BIRTH OP THOUGHT

ning of a new age. The earth ' gets a new skin '. Better still, it
finds its soul.

Therefore, given its place in reality in proper dimensions,
the historic threshold of reflection is much more important than
any zoological gap, whether it be the one marking the origin of
the tetrapods or even that of the metazoa. Among all the stages
successively crossed by evolution, the birth of thought comes
directly after, and is the only thing comparable in order of
importance to, the condensation of the terrestrial chemism or the
advent of life itself.

The paradox of man resolves itself by passing beyond measure.
Despite the relief and harmony it brings to things, this perspective
is at first sight disconcerting, running counter as it does to the
illusion and habits which incline us to measure events by their
material face. It also seems to us extravagant because, steeped
as wc are in what is human like a fish in the sea, we have diffi-
culty in emerging from it in our minds so as to appreciate its
specificness and breadth. But let us look round us a little more
carefully. This sudden deluge of cerebralisation, this biological
invasion of a new animal type which gradually eliminates or
subjects all forms of life that are not human, this irresistible tide
of fields and factories, this immense and growing edifice of
matter and ideas — all these signs that we look at, for days on end
— to proclaim that there has been a change on the earth and a
change of planetary magnitude.

There can indeed be no doubt that, to an imaginary geologist
coming one day far in the future to inspect our fossilised globe,
the most astounding of the revolutions undergone by the earth
would be that which took place at the beginning of what has
so rightly been called the psychozoic era. And even today, to a
Martian capable of analysing sidereal radiations psychically no
less than physically, the first characteristic of our planet would be,
not the blue of the seas or the green of the forests, but the phos-
phorescence of thought.

The greatest revelation open to science today is to perceive
that everything precious, active and progressive originally con-

183

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

tained in that cosmic fragment from which our world emerged,
is now concentrated in a ' crowning ' noospherc.

And what is so supremely instructive about the origins of
this noosphere (if we know how to look) is to see how gradually,
by dint of being universally and lengthily prepared, the enormous
event of its birth took place.

2. THE ORIGINAL FORMS

Man came silently into the world.

For a century or so, the scientific problem of the origin of
man has been under discussion, and a swelling team of research
workers has been digging feverishly into die past to discover
the initial point of hominisation, and yet I cannot find a more
expressive formula than this to sum up all our prehistoric know-
ledge. The more we find of fossil human remains and the better
we understand their anatomic features and their succession in
geological time, the more evident it becomes, by an unceasing
convergence of all signs and proofs, that the human ' species ',
however unique the ontological position that reflection gave
it, did not, at the moment of its advent, make any sweeping
change in nature. Whether we consider the species in its environ-
ment, in the morphology of its stem, or in the global structure of
its group, we see it emerge phyletically exactly like any other
species.

Firstly, in its environment. As we know from palaeontology,
an animal form never comes singly. It is sketched out in the
heart of a verticil of neighbouring forms among which it takes
shape, so to speak, gropingly. So it is with man. Regarded
zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature.
In his cradle he was less isolated. Nowadays there is no more
room for doubt. Over a well-defined but immense area, extend-
ing from South Africa to Southern China and Malaya, amongst
the rocks and the forest, at the end of the Tertiary period, the
anthropoids were far more numerous than they are today.

184

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

Besides the gorilla, chimpanzee and orang-outang, now thrown
back into their last strongholds like the Australian bushmen and
the negrillos of our day, there was a whole population of other big
primates, some of whom (the African Australopithecus, for
instance) seem to have been far more hominoid than any alive
today.

Secondly, in the morphology of its stem. With the multiplica-
tion of sister-forms ', what indicates to the naturalist the origin
of a living stem is a certain convergence of the axis of that stem
with that of its neighbours. In the proximity of a knot, the leaves
grow closer together. Not only is a species at its birth found
bunched with others, but, like them it betrays much more
clearly than in adult life its zoological parentage. The farther we
follow an animal line back into the past, the more numerous
and the more palpable arc its ' primitive ' features. Here too,
man, on the whole, keeps strictly to the habitual phyletic mechan-
ism. All we need is to try to arrange in a descending series
Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus after the Neanderthaloids
below present-day man. Palaeontology does not often succeed
in tracing so satisfying an alignment.

Thirdly, in the structure oj its group. However well-defined
the characters of a phylum may be, it is never found to be alto-
gether simple, like a pure radiation. On the contrary, as far
as we can follow it into the depths of its past, it manifests an
internal tendency to cleavage and dispersion. Newly born, or
even while being born, the species breaks up into varieties or
sub-species. This is known to all naturalists. Keeping it in mind,
let us take another look at man, man whose pre-history (even
the most ancient) proves his congenital aptitude for ramification.
Is it possible to deny that in the fan of the anthropoids he isolated
himself — in this subject to the laws of all animate matter — as a
fan of his own ?

I was not exaggerating in the least. The more deeply science
plumbs the past of our humanity, the more clearly does it see
that humanity, as a species, conforms to the rhythm and the rules
that marked each new offshoot on the tree of life before the

185

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

advent of mankind. Thus we are logically obliged to pursue
the subject to its conclusion. Since man as a species is at birth so
similar to the other phyla, let us stop being surprised if, as with
all living groups, the fragile secrets of his earliest origins give
our science the slip; and let us henceforward forbear to force
and falsify this natural condition with clumsy questionings.

Man came silently into the world. As a matter of fact he
trod so softly that, when we first catch sight of him as revealed
by those indestructible stone instruments, we find him sprawling
all over the old world from the Cape of Good Hope to Peking.
Without doubt he already speaks and lives in groups ; he already
makes fire. After all, this is surely what we ought to expect.
As we know, each time a new living form rises up before us out
of the depths of history, it is always complete and already legion.
Thus in the eyes of science, which at long range can only see
things in bulk, the ' first man ' is, and can only be, a crowd, and
his infancy is made up of thousands and thousands of years. 1

It is inevitable that this situation should be disappointing,
leaving our curiosity unsatisfied. For what most interests us is
precisely what happened during those first thousands of years.
And still more, what marked the first critical moment. Dearly
would we love to know what those first parents o( ours looked
like, the ones that stood just this side of the threshold of reflection.
As I have already said, that threshold had to be crossed in a single
stride. Imagine the past to have been photographed section by
section : at that critical moment of initial hominisation, what
should we sec when we developed our fdm ?

If we have understood the limits of enlargement imposed by
nature on the instrument which helps us to study the landscape

1 That is why the problem of monogenism in the stria sense of the word
(I do not say monophyletism— see below) seems to elude science as such by its
very nature. At those depths of time when hominisation took place, the
presence and the movements of a unique couple are positively ungraspable,
unrcvealable to our eyes at no matter what magnification. Accordingly one
can say that there is room m this interval for anything that a trans-experimental
source of knowledge might demand.

1 86

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

of the past, we shall be prepared to forgo the satisfaction of
this futile curiosity. No photograph could record upon the
human phylum diis passage to reflection which so naturally
intrigues us, for the simple reason that the phenomenon took
place inside that which is always lacking in a reconstructed
phylum — the peduncle of its original forms.

But if die tangible forms of this peduncle escape us, can we
not at any rate guess indirectly at its complexity and initial
structure ? On these points palaeanthropology has not yet made
up its mind. We could, however, try to form an opinion. 1

A number of anthropologists, and those not the least eminent,
think the peduncle of our race must have been composed of
several distinct but related ' bundles '. Just as, on the plane of
human intellect, once a certain degree of preparation and tension
has been reached, the same idea may come to birth at several
points simultaneously, so in the same way, man, according to
these authorities, must have started simultaneously in several
regions on the ' anthropoid layer ' of the Pliocene era, thereby
following the general mechanism of all life. This is not properly
speaking ' polyphyletism ', because the different points of
germination are located on the same zoological stem, but it is an
extensive mutation of the whole stein itself. The idea involves
' hologenesis ' and therefore polycentricity. What we get is a
whole series of points of hominisation scattered along a sub-
tropical zone of the earth, and hence several human stems be-
coming genetically merged somewhere beneath the threshold of
reflection ; not a ' focus ' but a ' front ' of evolution.

Though not disputing the value and the scientific probabilities
of this perspective, I feel myself personally attracted to a slightly

1 Some idea of how the transit to man was effected zoologically is perhaps
suggested by the case of Australopithecus mentioned above. In this South
African family of Pliocene anthropomorphs (evidently a group in a state of
active mutation) in which a whole scries of hominoid characters overlay a
basis still clearly simian, we can see an image perhaps, or call it a faint echo,
of what was taking place at about the same period even not far from there, in
another anthropoid group, in this case culminating in genuine hominisa-
tion.

I8 7

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

different hypothesis. I have already stressed several times that

curious peculiarity shown by zoological branches of bearing

fixed on them, like essential characters, certain traits whose origin

is plainly peculiar and accidental— such as the tritubercular teeth

and seven cervical vertebrae of the higher mammals, the four-

footedness of the walking vertebrates, the rotatory power in one

particular direction of organic substances. Precisely because these

traits are secondary and accidental, their universal occurrence

in groups, sometimes vast, can only be properly explained by

assuming these groups to derive from a highly particularised

and therefore extremely localised verticil. We would thus

perhaps find no more than a single radiation in a verticil to support

originally a layer or even a branch or even the whole of life. Or,

if some convergence has played a part, it can only have been

amongst closely-related fibres.

In the light of these considerations, and particularly when
dealing with a group as homogeneous and specialised as the one
under discussion, I feel inclined to minimise die effects of paral-
lelism in the initial formation of the human branch. On the
verticil of the higher primates, this branch did not, in my opinion,
glean its fibres here and there, one by one, from the whole
range offered : but, even more closely than any other species,
this branch, I am convinced, represents the thickening and suc-
cessful development of one solitary stem among all— this stem
being, moreover, the most central of the collection because the
most vital and, except for the brain, the least specialised. If
that is right, all human lines join up genetically, but at the
bottom, at the very point of reflection. 1

And now, if we do assume the strictly unique existence of
such a peduncle at the origin of man, what more (still keeping
to the plane of pure phenomena) can we say about its length
and probable thickness ? Should we, like Osborn, locate its

1 Which amounts to saying that if the science of man can say nothing directly
for or against monogenism (a single initial couple— sec note p. 186) it can on
the other hand come out decisively, it seems, in favour of monophyletism (a
single phylum).

188

THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT

separation very low down, in the Eocene or Oligocene period
in a ramification of pre-anthropoid forms ? Or should we, like
W. K. Gregory, regard it as a branching off from the anthropoid
verticil as late as the Pliocene age ?

Another question, always on the same subject and still
maintaining a strictly ' phenomenal ' attitude : what minimum
diameter should we ascribe as biologically possible to this stem
(whether it is deep or not) if we consider it at its initial point
of hominisation ? For it to be able to ' mutate ', resist and live,
what is the minimum number of individuals (in order of size)
that must have undergone simultaneously the metamorphosis of
reflec:ion ? However monophyletic one supposes it to be, surely
a species is always sketched out like a diffuse current in a river — by
mass effects ? Or, on the contrary, should wc rather view it as
propagating itself like crystallisation beginning with a few parts
— by effect of unities ? In our minds the two symbols (each pardy
uue perhaps) still conflict and have their respective advantages
and attractions. We must have the patience to wait until their
synthesis is established.

Let us wait. And to encourage our patience let us recall
the two following points.

The first is that on every hypothesis, however solitary his
advent, man emerged from a general groping of the world. He
was born a direct lineal descendant from a total effort of life,
so that the species has an axial value and a pre-eminent dignity.
At bottom, to satisfy our intelligence and the requirements of
our conduct, we have no need to know more than this.

The second point is that, fascinating as the problem of our
origin is, its solution even in detail would not solve the problem
of man. Wc have every reason to regard the discovery of fossil
men as one of the most illuminating and critical lines of modern
research. We must not, however, on that account, entertain
any illusions concerning the limits in all its domains of that form
of analysis that we call embryogenesis. If in its structure the
embryo of each thing is fragile, fleeting and hence, in the past,
practically ungraspablc, how much more is it ambiguous and

189

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

undecipherable in its lineaments ? It is not in their germinal
state that beings manifest themselves but in their florescence.
Taken at the source, the greatest rivers are no more than narrow

streams.

To grasp the truly cosmic scale of the phenomenon of man,
we had to follow its roots through life, back to when the earth
first folded in on itself. But if we want to understand the specific
nature of man and divine his secret, we have no other method
than to observe what reflection has already provided and what
it announces ahead.

TOO

CHAPTER TWO

THE DEPLOYMENT OF
THE NOOSPHERE

In order to multiply the contacts necessary for its gropings
and to be able to store up the multifarious variety of its riches,
life is obliged to move forward in terms of deep masses. And
when therefore its course emerges from the gorges in which a
new mutation has so to speak strangled it, the narrower the
channel from which it emerges and the vaster the surface it has
to cover with its flow, the more it needs to re-group itself in
multitude.

Our picture is of mankind labouring under the impulsion of
an obscure instinct, so as to break out through its narrow point
of emergence and submerge the earth ; of thought becoming
number so as to conquer all habitable space, taking precedence
over all other forms of life ; of mind, in other words, deploy-
ing and convoluting the layers of the noosphere. This effort at
multiplication and organic expansion is, for him who can see,
the summing up and final expression of human pre-history and
history, from the earliest beginnings down to the present day.

We will now try, in a few bold strokes, to map out the
phases or successive waves of this invasion (diag. 4).

1. THE RAMIFYING PHASE OF THE
PRE-HOMINIDS

Towards the very end of the lower Pleistocene period, a vast
upward movement, a positive jolt, seems to have affected the

191

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERB

■ - MODERN
- NEOLITHIC

Homo sapiens

Neanderthaloid

Prehominions

+ — + Australopithecus
Socialized Zone

J

A
//J

diagram 4. The development of the human Layer.
The figures on the left indicate thousands of years. They
are a minimum estimate and should probably be at least
doubled. The hypothetical zone of convergence on the point
Omega is obviously not to scale. By analogy with other
living layers, its duration should certainly run into thousands
of years.

continental masses of the old world from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. 1 Almost everywhere, at this period, we find the land
being drained, ravines being carved, and thick layers of alluvium
spreading over the plains. Before this great upheaval we can
establish no certain trace of man anywhere. Yet it was barely over
when we find chipped stone mixed with the gravels on almost
all the raised lands of Africa, Western Europe and Southern
Asia.

Man of the Lower Quaternary period, the contemporary
and the author of these earliest tools is only known to us in
two fossil remains. We know them well, however — the Pithe-
canthropus of Java, long represented only by a simple skull,
but now by much more satisfactory specimens recendy dis-
covered ; and the Sinanthropus of China, numerous specimens
of which have been found in the last ten years. These two beings
are so closely related that the nature of each would have remained
obscure if we had not had the good fortune to be able to compare
them. 8

What can we learn from these venerable relics which are at
least some one or two hundred thousand years old ?

To begin with, anthropologists are now in agreement on
one point : both Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus are already
definitely hominid in their anatomy. If we arrange their skulls
in series between those of the great apes on the one hand and
modern man on the other, we are at once struck by the wide
morphological breach, the void, apparent between them and the
anthropoids, while on the human side they seem to fall naturally
into the same cast. We find a relatively short face and a relatively
spacious cranium. In Trinil man die cerebral capacity hardly
descends below 800 c.c. while with Peking man in the biggest

1 At the end of the Villafranchian age, to be more exact. [By a decision of
the International Geological Congress (1948), the Villafranchian is now included
in the Pleistocene.]

* To avoid complicating the story, I will say nothing here of Heidelberg
man. However ancient and remarkable his jaw, we do not know enough
about him to determine his real anthropological position.

193

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

males it reaches noo. 1 We find a lower jaw essentially con-
structed on human lines towards the symphysis, and lastly and
most important of all. we find erect biped posture leaving the
fore limbs free. With all these signs it is quite obvious that we
are on the human side of the line.

However hominid the Pithecanthropus and Smanthropus
were, judged by their physiognomy they were certainly strange
creatures such as have long ago vanished from the earth. Elon-
gated skull, markedly compressed behind enormous orbits ;
flattened cranium whose transverse section, instead of being
ovoid or pentagonal, as with us, forms an arch widely open at
the level of the ears ; strongly ossified skull whose brain-box
does not project backwards but is surrounded posteriorly by a
thick occipital roll ; a prognathous skull whose dental arches
project far forward above a symphysis which not only lacks a
chin but is receding ; and finally, highly marked sexual dimor-
phism, the females being small with rather slender jaws and
teeth, 'the males robust with strong molars and canines. These
various characters, in no way teratologicai, but expressing a
well-established, well-balanced architecture, seem to suggest, ana-
tomically, a downward convergence towards the ' simian ' world.
All things considered, the scientist can affirm without further
hesitation that, thanks to the double discovery of Trinil man
and Peking man, we recognise within mankind a further morpho-
logical rung, a further evolutionary stage and a further zoological

verticil.

They are a morphological rung because on the line separating,
for instance, a white man from a chimpanzee, we must place them,
by the form of their skull, almost exactly half-way ;

They are an evolutionary stage because, whether they have
or have not left any direct descendants in the contemporary
world, they probably represent a type through which modern
man must once have passed in the course of his phylogenesis ;

Lastly, they are a zoological verticil, for, though in all appear-
1 In present-day anthropoid apes, the cerebral capacity does not exceed
600 c.c.

TQ4

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHEHE

ance narrowly localised on the farthest confines of Eastern Asia,
this group obviously belonged to a very much bigger group
whose nature and structure 1 shall be dealing with a little further
on.

In short, Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus are far from being
merely a couple of interesting anthropological types. Through
them, we are able to glimpse a whole wave of mankind.

Thus palaeontologists have once again shown their sense of
proportion in picking out this very old and very primitive human
layer and treating it as a distinct natural unity, to which they
have even given a name, calling these early types the pre-hominids.
This is an expressive and correct term from the standpoint of
the anatomical progression of forms, but one liable to veil or
misplace that psychic discontinuity in which we thought it
necessary to place the very pith of hominisation. To call
Pithecanthropus and Smanthropus pre-hominids might suggest
that they were not yet quite man. And that, according to my
argument, would mean they had not yet crossed the threshold of
reflection. The contrary seems to me much more probable ;
that, while admittedly far from having reached the level on
which we stand, they were already, both of them, in the full
sense of the word, intelligent beings.

That they were so seems to me to be stipulated by the
general mechanism of phylogenesis. A mutation as fundamental
as that of thought, a mutation which gives its specific impetus
to the whole human group, could not in my opinion have
appeared in the middle of the journey ; it could not have hap-
pened half-way up the stalk. It dominates the whole edifice.
Its place must therefore be beneath every recognisable verticil
in the unattainable depths of the peduncle, and thus beneath
those creatures which (however pre-hominid in cranial structure)
are already clearly situated above the point of origin and blossom-
ing of our human race.

And there is more to it than that. So far we can find no
trace of industry associated directly with the remains of Pithe-
canthropus. This is due to the conditions of where they lie :

195

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

around Trinil the fossils are of bones that have been carried

down by streams to a Jake. Near Peking, on the other hand,

Sinanthropus has been caught in his lair, a filled-up cave littered

with stone implements mixed with charred bones. Ought we,

as M. Boule suggests, to see in this industry (sometimes, I admit,

of an astonishing quality) the vestiges of another man, unknown

to us, to whom Sinanthropus, himself not a homo fabcr, served as

prey ? As long as no remains are found of this hypothetical man,

1 consider the idea gratuitous and, everything considered, less

scientific. Sinanthropus already worked stones and made fire.

Until disproved, those two accomplishments must be considered

on the same level as reflection, forming with it an integral part

of the ' peduncle '. Taken together in one strand, these three

elements crop up universally at the same time as mankind. That,

objectively, is the situation.

And if it is really so, we see that despite their osteological
features so reminiscent of the anthropoids, the prc-hominids
were psychologically much nearer to us and thus phylctically
much less young and primitive than might have been supposed.
It must have taken time to discover fire and the art of making
a cutting tool— so much so that there is plenty of room for at
least one more human verticil still lower down, which we shall
perhaps unearth one day in Villafranchian times.

We have already said that other hominids, at a similar stage
of development, unquestionably lived at the same time as
Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus. Unfortunately we have only
very inadequate relics of them : the famous jaw from Heidelberg
perhaps, and the badly preserved cranium of Africanthropus
from East Africa. This is not enough to enable us to work
out the general physiognomy of the group. An observation
may, however, serve to shed light indirectly on what we want
to know.

We now know two species of Pithecanthropus, one relatively
small, the other much more robust and ' brutal '. To these
must be added two other forms positively gigantic, the one from
Java represented by the fragment of a jaw, the other from South

196

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

China by some isolated teeth. This makes, with Sinanthropus (for
the same period and the same continental fringe), five different
types in all, certainly related.

This multiplicity of related forms living closely pressed
together in a narrow strip, and also this curious common
tendency to gigantism, surely suggest the idea of an isolated,
marginal, zoological offshoot mutating upon itself in an almost
autonomous manner. And so it might seem that what was
going on in China and Malaya may have had its equivalent
elsewhere, in the case of other stems farther west.

If this is so we should have to say that, zoologically speaking,
the human group in the Lower Quaternary period still formed
only a loosely coherent group in which the divergent structure,
usual in animal verticils, was still dominant.

But at the same time, doubtless in the more central regions
of the continents, 1 the elements of a new and more compact
wave of mankind were mustering, ready to take over from this
archaic world.

2. THE GROUP OF THE NEANDER.THALOIDS

Geologically, after the Lower Quaternary period, the curtain
falls. During the interval, the Trinil deposits were folded ; the
red earth of China was carved with valleys ready to receive
their thick coating of yellow loess ; the face of Africa was
further fissured ; elsewhere glaciations advanced and receded.
When the curtain rises again some sixty thousand years ago,
and we can see the scene again, we find that the pre-hominids
have disappeared. Their place is now occupied by the Neander-
thaloids.

This new humanity is much better represented by fossil
remains than the preceding one, because it is not only more

1 Perhaps among the populations whose anatomical form is still unknown,
but whose 'bi-faccd' industry can be followed in the ancient Pleistocene
from the Cape to the Thames and from Spain to Java.

197

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

recent, but also more numerous. Little by little the network of
thought has extended and consolidated.

We find both progress in number and progress in hominisa-
tion.

With Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus, science could still
hesitate, wondering what sort of creature it was dealing with.
By the Middle Quaternary period, on the other hand, except
for a moment's hesitation at the Spy cranium or the Neanderthal
skull, there is never any serious doubt but that we are studying
the vestiges of members of our own race. This great development
of the brain, this industry of the caves, and for the first time those
incontestable cases of burial— everything goes to show that we
are in the presence of true man.

We have true man, then— but man who was not yet pre-
cisely us.

We fmd his cranium generally elongated, a low forehead,
thick, prominent orbital ridges, a still noticeable prognathism
of the face, as a rule the absence of canine fossae, absence of
chin, large teeth without any distinct neck between crown and
root. Confronted with these different features, no anthropolo-
gist could fail to recognise at a glance the fossil remains of a
European Neandcrthaloid. No people on earth today could be
confused with him, not even an Australian Aborigine or an
Aino. The advance from Trinil or Peking man is, as I have said,
manifest ; but the gulf in relation to modern man is hardly
less. Accordingly we have now another rung on the morpho-
logical ladder, another evolutionary stage. And in conformity
with the laws of phylogenesis we must inevitably suspect another
zoological verticil here, whose reality has not ceased to assert
itself in pre-history in the last few years. When the first Mous-
terian crania were discovered in Western Europe, and when it
became dear that these bones had not belonged cither to idiots
or degenerates, anatomists were naturally led to imagine that
in the Middle Palaeolithic age the earth was peopled by men
corresponding exactly to the Neanderthal type. Whence a
certain disappointment, perhaps, when fresh discoveries, more

198

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

and more numerous, failed to confirm this simple hypothesis.
Actually the diversity of the Neanderthaloids, year by year more
apparent, is precisely what we ought to have expected. For we can
now see it is that very diversity which definitely gives to their
' bundle ' its interest and its true physiognomy.

Of the forms called Neanderthaloids, our science today
recognises two distinct groups at different levels of phyletic
evolution, a group of terminal forms and an infant group :

a. The terminal group. Survivors, gradually dying out, of the
more or less autonomous offshoots which probably composed
the pre-hominid verticil — Solo man of Java, a direct and scarcely
changed descendant of Trinil man, 1 in Africa the extraordinarily
brutal Rhodesian man and, in Europe, unless I am mistaken,
Neanderthal man himself who, in spite of his remarkable and
persistent distribution over the whole of Western Europe, seems
really to represent nothing but the last florescence of a dying stock.

b. The infant group. A nebulous, not easily distinguishable
group of pseudo-Neanderthaloids with primitive features, but
definitely modernised or modernisable — a rounder head, less
prominent orbital ridges, canine fossae better marked, sometimes
the beginning of a chin : such are Steinhcim man and the finds
in Palestine. They arc incontestably Neanderthaloids, but they
are ever so much nearer to us ; a progressive branch, sleeping,
one might say, waiting for the coming dawn.

So let us put this triple ' bundle ' in its proper light, geo-
graphically and morphologically. Far from being a disconcerting
combination, the pattern is familiar. Leaves which have just
fallen ; leaves still alive but beginning to turn yellow ; leaves
not yet opened but full of vigour ; the complete section, almost
an ideal one, of zoological ramification.

1 Found in number in the horizontal terraces levelling the folded beds at
Trinil, homo soloensis seems to have been simply a big Pithecanthropus with a
more rounded cranium. This is an almost unique case in palaeontology, ot one
and the same phylum seen at the same place, across a geological discordance,
at two different stages of its development.

199

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

3. THE HOMO SAPIENS COMPLEX

One of the great surprises of botany is to see at the beginning
of the Cretaceous period the world of cycads and conifers
abruptly submerged and replaced by a forest of angiosperms,
plane trees, oaks, etc., the bulk of modern forms bursting ready-
made on the Jurassic flora from some unknown region of the
globe. No less is the anthropologist bewildered when he discovers,
superimposed upon each other, hardly separated in the caves
by a floor of stalagmites, Mousterian man and Cromagnon man
or Aurignacian man. Here there is hardly any geological hiatus
at all, yet none the less we find a fundamental rejuvenation of
mankind. We fuid the sudden invasion of Homo sapiens, driven
by climate or the restlessness of his soul, sweeping over the Nean-
derthaloids.

Where did he come from, this new man ? Some anthropo-
logists would like to see in him the culmination of certain lines
of development already pin-pointed in earlier epochs— a direct
descendant, for example, of Sinanthropus. For definite technical
reasons, however, and still more because of overall analogies,
it is better to view things in another way. Without doubt,
somewhere or other and in his oivn way, Upper Palaeolithic man
must have passed through a prc-hominid phase and then through
a Neanderthaloid one. But, like the mammals, the trituberculates,
and all the other phyla, he disappears from our field of vision
in the course of his (possibly accelerated) embryogencsis. We
find imbrication and replacement rather than continuity and
prolongation : the law of succession once again dominates history.
I can thus easily picture the new-comer as the scion of an autono-
mous line of evolution, long hidden though secretly active— to
emerge triumphantly one fine day doubdess in the midst of those
pseudo-Neanderthaloids whose vital and probably very ancient
' bundle ' we have already mentioned. But at any rate, one thing
is certain and admitted by everybody. The man we find on the

200

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

face of the earth at the end of the Quaternary period is already
modern man — and in every way.

First of all anatomically without any possible doubt. We
see it in his high forehead with reduced orbits ; in his well-
rounded parietal bones ; in his weak occipital crest now below
his swelling brain ; in his slight jaw with its prominent chin —
all these features, so well marked in the last cave-dwellers, are
definitely our own. So clearly are they ours that, from this
moment onwards, the palaeontologist, accustomed to working
on pronounced morphological differences, no longer finds it
easy to distinguish between the remains of these fossil men and
men today. For that subtle task their over-all methods and
visual sizing-up are no longer adequate, and they must now
have recourse to the most delicate techniques (and audacities)
of anthropology. We arc no longer dealing with the recon-
struction on general lines of the mounting horizons of life, but
■with the analysis of the overlapping nuances making up our fore-
ground. Thirty thousand years. A long period measured in
terms of our lifetime, but it is a mere second for evolution.
From the osteological point of view there is during this interval
no appreciable breach of continuity in the human phylum. It
might even be said that there is, up to a point, no major change
in the progress of its somatic ramification.

And this is where we get our greatest surprise. In itself, it is
only very natural that the stem of Homo sapiens fossilis, studied at
its point of emergence, far from being simple, should display in
the composition and divergence of its fibres the complex structure
of a fan. This is, as we know, the initial condition of each phylum
on the tree of life. At the very least we should have counted on
finding, in those depths, a cluster of relatively primitive and
generalised forms, something antecedent in form to our present
races. And what we fmd is rather the opposite. Assuming one
can trust bones to give us an idea of flesh and blood, what were in
fact those first representatives, in the age ot the reindeer, of a
new human verticil freshly opening ? Nothing more or less
than what we see living today in approximately the same

201

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

regions of the earth. Negroes, white men and yellow men
(or at the most pre-negro, pre-white and pre-yellow), and those
various groups already for the most part settled to north, to
south, to east, to west, in their present geographical zones. That
is what we find all over the ancient world from Europe to China
at the end of the last Ice Age. Accordingly when we study Upper
Palaeolithic man, not only in the essential features of his anatomy
but also in the main lines of his ethnography, it is really ourselves
and our own infancy that we are finding, not only the skeleton
of modern man already there, but the framework of modem
humanity. We see the same general bodily form ; the same
fundamental distribution of races ; the same tendency (at least in
outline) for the ethnic groups to join up together in a coherent
system, over-riding all divergence. And (how could it fail to
follow?) the same essential aspirations in the depths of their soul.
Among the Neanderthaloids, as we have seen, a psychic
advance was manifest, shown amongst other signs by the presence
in the caves of the first graves. Even to the more brutal Neander-
thals, everyone is prepared to grant the flame of a genuine
intelligence. Most of it, however, seems to have been used up
in the sheer effort to survive and reproduce. If there was any
left over, we see no signs of it or fail to recognise them. What
went on in the minds of those distant cousins of ours ? We
have no idea. But in the age of the reindeer, with homo sapiens,
it is a definitely liberated thought which explodes, still warm,
on to the walls of the caves. Within them, these new-comers
brought art, an art still naturalistic but prodigiously accom-
plished. And thanks to the language of this art, we can for the
first time enter right into the consciousness of these vanished
beings whose bones we put together. There is a strange spiritual
nearness, even in detail. Those rites expressed in red and black
on the walls of caves in Spain, in the Pyrenees and Pengord,
are after all still practised under our eyes in Africa, in Oceania,
and even in America. What difference is there, for example,
between the sorcerer of the Trois-Freres Cave dressed up in
his deerskin, and some oceanic god ? But that's not the most

202

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

important point. We could make mistakes in interpreting in
modern terms the prints of hands, the bewitched bisons, and
the fertility symbols which give expression to the preoccupation
and religion of an Aurignacian or a Magdalenian man. Where
we could not be mistaken is in perceiving in the artists of those
distant ages a power of observation, a love of fantasy, and a joy
in creation (manifest as much in the perfection of movement
and outline as in the spontaneous play of chiselled ornament)
— these ilowers of a consciousness not merely reflecting upon
itself, but rejoicing in so doing. So the examination of skeletons
and skulls has not led us astray. In the Upper Quaternary
period it is indeed and in the fullest sense present-day man
at whom we are looking, not yet adult, admittedly, but having
nevertheless reached the ' age of reason '. And when we compare
him to ourselves, his brain is already perfect, so perfect that
since that time there seems to have been no measurable variation
or increased perfection in the organic instrument of our thought.

Are we to say, then, that the evolution in man ceased widi
the end of the Quaternary era ?

Not at all. But, without prejudice to what may still be
developing slowly and secretly in the depths of the nervous
system, evolution has since that date overtly overflowed its
anatomical modalities to spread, or perhaps even to transplant
its main thrust into the zones of psychic spontaneity both indivi-
dual and collective.

Henceforward it is in that form almost exclusively that we
shall be recognising it and following its course.

4. THE NEOLITHIC METAMORPHOSIS

Throughout living phyla, at all events among the higher animals
where wc can follow the process more easily, social development
is a progress that comes relatively late. It is an achievement of
maturity. In man, for reasons closely connected with his power
of reflection, this transformation is accelerated. As far back

203

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

as we can meet them, our great-great-ancestors are to be found
in groups and gathered round the fire.

Definite as may be the signs of association at those remote
periods, the whole phenomenon is far from being clearly out-
lined. Even in the Upper Palaeolithic era, the peoples we meet
with seem to have constituted no more tlian loosely bound
groups of wandering hunters. It was only in the Neolithic age
that the great cementing of human elements began which was
never thenceforward to stop. The Neolithic age, disdained by
pre-historians because it is too young, neglected by historians
because its phases cannot be exactly dated, was nevertheless a
critical age and one of solemn importance among all the epochs
of the past, for in it Civilisation was born.

Under what conditions did that birth take place ? Once
again, and always in conformity with the laws regulating our
vision of time in retrospect, we do not know. A few years ago
it was usual to speak of a ' great gap ' between the last levels of
chipped stone and the earliest levels of polished stone and pottery.
Since then a series of intercalated horizons, better defmed, have
little by little brought together the verges of this gap, yet
essentially the gulf still persists. Did it come from a play of
migrations, or was it the effect of contagion ? Was it due to the
sudden arrival of some ethnic wave, which had been silently
assembling in some other and more fertile region of the globe,
or the irresistible propagation of fruitful innovations ? Did
the emphasis he on a movement of peoples or primarily on a
movement of cultures ? We should find it hard, as yet, to say.
What is certain is that, after a gap geologically negligible, but
long enough nevertheless for the selection and domestication of all
the animals and plants on which we are still living today, we find
sedentary and socially organised men in place of the nomadic
hunters of the horse and the reindeer. In a matter of ten or
twenty thousand years man divided up the earth and struck
his roots in it.

In this decisive period of socialisation, as previously at the
instant of reflection, a cluster of partially independent factors

204

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

seems to have mysteriously converged to favour and even to
force the pace of hominisation. Let us try to sort them out.

First of all come the incessant advances of multiplication.
With the rapidly growing number of individuals the available
land diminished. The groups pressed against one another. As
a result migrations were on a smaller scale. The problem now
was how to get the most out of ever more diminishing land,
and we can well imagine that under pressure of this necessity
the idea was born of conserving and reproducing on the spot
what had hitherto been sought for and pursued far and wide.
Agriculture and stock-breeding, the husbandman and the herds-
man, replaced mere gathering and hunting.

From that fundamental change all the rest followed. In the
growing agglomerations the complex of rights and duties began
to appear, leading to the invention of all sorts of communal
and juridical structures whose vestiges we can still see today in
the shadow of the great civilisations among the least progressive
populations of the world. In regard to property, morals and
marriage, every possible social form seems to have been tried.

Simultaneously, in the more stable and more densely popu-
lated environment created by the first farms, the need and the
taste for research were stimulated and became more methodical.
It was a marvellous period of investigation and invention when,
in the unequalled freshness of a new beginning, the eternal
groping of life burst out in conscious reflection. Everything
possible seems to have been attempted in this extraordinary
period : the selection and empirical improvement of fruits,
cereals, live-stock ; the science of pottery ; and weaving. Very
soon followed the first elements of pictographic writing, and
soon the first beginnings of metallurgy.

Then, in virtue of all this, consolidated on itself and better
equipped for conquest, mankind could fling its final waves in
the assault on those positions which had not yet fallen to it.
Henceforward it was in the full flush of expansion. It was in
fact at the dawn of the Neolithic age that man reached America
(passing through an Alaska free of ice and perhaps by other ways)

205

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

there to start again — on new material and at the cost of new
efforts — his patient work of installation and domestication.
Among them were many hunters and fishers still living a more
or less Palaeolithic life despite their pottery and polished stone.
But beside them were genuine tillers of the soil — the maize
eaters. And at the same time, no doubt, another layer began to
spread whose long trail is still marked by the presence of banana
trees, mango trees and coconut palms — the fabulous adventure
across the Pacific.

At the end of this metamorphosis (whose existence, once
again, we can only just infer from the results) die world was
practically covered with a population whose remains — polished
stone implements, mill stones and shards, found under recent
humus or sand deposits — litter the old earth of the continents.

Mankind was of course still very much split up. To get an
idea of it, we must think of what the first white men found in
America or Africa — a veritable mosaic of groups, profoundly
different both ethnically and socially.

But mankind was already outlined and linked up. Since the
age of the reindeer the peoples had been little by little finding
their definitive place, even in matters of detail. Between them
exchanges increased in the commerce of objects and the trans-
mission of ideas. Traditions became organised and a collective
memory was developed. Slender and granular as this first
membrane might be, the noosphere there and then began to
close in upon itself — and to encircle the earth.

THE PROLONGATIONS OF THE

NEOLITHIC AGE
AND THE RISE OF THE WEST

We have retained the habit, come down to us from the days
when human palaeontology did not exist, of isolating that par-
ticular slice of six thousand years or so for which we possess
written or dated documents. This for us is History, as opposed

206

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

to pre-History. In reality, however, there is no breach of con-
tinuity between the two. The better we get the past into
perspective, the more clearly we see that the periods called
' historic ' (right down to and including the beginning of
' modern ' times) are nothing else than direct prolongations of
the Neolithic age. Of course, as we shall point out, there was
increasing complexity and differentiation, but essentially follow-
ing the same lines and on the same plane.

From the biological point of view — which is the one we
are taking — how shall we define and represent the progress of
hominisation in the course of this period, so short yet so pro-
digiously fruitful ?

Essentially, what history records among the welter of
institutions, peoples and empires, is the normal expansion of
Homo sapiens at the heart of the social atmosphere created by
the Neolithic transformation. We find a gradual falling away
of the oldest ' splinters ' some of which, like the Australian
aborigines, still adhere to the extreme fringe of our civilisation
and our continents ; on die other hand we find accentuation
and domination of certain other stems, more central and more
vigorous, which attempt to monopolise the land and the light.
Here and there we find disappearances causing a thinning-out,
here and there some fresh buddings which make the foliage
more dense. Some branches wither, some sleep, some shoot up
and spread everywhere. We find endless interlacing of ramifi-
cations, none of which allow their peduncles to be seen clearly,
not even at a mere two thousand years back ; in other words the
whole series of cases, situations and appearances usually met
with in any phylum in a state of active proliferation.

Nor is this quite all. We might suppose that, after the
Neolithic age, what constituted the extreme difficulty, but also
the exceptional interest, of human phylogenesis was the proximity
of the facts, allowing us to follow with the naked eye, as it were,
the biological mechanism of the ramification of the species. In
fact, something more than that happens.

So long as science had to deal only with pre-historic human

207

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

groups, more or less isolated and to a greater or less extent
undergoing anthropological formation, the general rules of
animal phylogenesis were still approximately valid. From
Neolithic times onwards the influence of psychical factors
begins to outweigh — and by far— the variations of ever-dwindling
somatic factors. And henceforward the foreground is taken up
by the two series of effects we announced above when describing
the main lines of hominisation — (i) the apparition above the
genealogical verticils of political and cultural units ; a complex
scale of groupings which, on the multiple planes of geographical
distribution, economic links, religious beliefs and social institu-
tions, have proved capable, after submerging ' the race ', of
reacting between themselves in every proportion ; and simul-
taneously (ii) the manifestation — between these branches of a
new kind — of the forces of coalescence (anastomoses, confluences)
liberated in each one by the individualisation of psychological
sheath, or more precisely of an axis — a whole conjugated play of
divergences and convergences.

There is no need for me to emphasise the reality, diversity
and continual germination of human collective unities, at any
rate potentially divergent ; such as the birth, multiplication and
evolution of nations, states and civilisations. We see the spec-
tacle on every hand, its vicissitudes fdl the annals of the peoples.
But there is one thing that must not be forgotten if we want to
enter into and appreciate the drama. However hominised the
events, the history of mankind in this rationalised form really
does prolong — though in its own way and degree — the organic
movements of life. It is still natural history through the pheno-
mena of social ramification that it relates.

Much more subtle and fraught with biological potentialities
are the phenomena of confluence. Let us try to follow them in
their mechanism and their consequences.

Between animal branches or phyla of low ' psychical '
endowment, reactions are limited to competition and eventually
to elimination. The stronger supplants the weaker and ends by
stifling it. The only exceptions to this brutal, almost mechanical

208

THE DEPLOYMENT OP THE NOOSPHERE

law of substitution are those (mostly functional) associations of
' symbiosis ' inferior organisms — or with the most socialised
insects, the enslavement of one group by another.

With man (at all events with Post-Neolithic man) simple
elimination tends to become exceptional, or at all events second-
ary. However brutal the conquest, the suppression is always
accompanied by some degree of assimilation. Even when
partially absorbed, the vanquished still reacts on the victor so
as to transform him. There is, as the geologists call the process,
endomorphosis — especially in the case of a peaceful cultural
invasion, and yet still more with populations, equally resistant
and active, which interpenetrate slowly under prolonged tension.
What happens then is mutual permeation of the psychisms com-
bined with a remarkable and significant interfecundity. Under
this two-fold influence, veritable biological combinations are
established and fixed which shuffle and blend ethnic traditions
at the same time as cerebral genes. Formerly, on the tree of life
we had a mere tangle of stems ; now over the whole domain
of Homo sapiens we have synthesis.

But of course we do not find this everywhere to the same
extent.

Because of the haphazard configuration of continents on the
earth, some regions are more favourable than others for the
concourse and mixing of races — extended archipelagoes, junctions
of valleys, vast cultivable plains, particularly, irrigated by a
great river. In such privileged places there has been a natural
tendency ever since the installation of settled life for the human
mass to concentrate, to fuse, and for its temperature to rise.
Whence the no doubt ' congenital ' appearance on the Neolithic
layer of certain foci of attraction and organisation, the prelude
and presage of some new and superior state for the noosphere.
Five of these foci, of varying remoteness in the past, can easily
be picked out — Central America, with its Maya civilisation ;
the South Seas, with Polynesian civilisation ; the basin of
Yellow River, with Chinese civilisation ; the valleys of the
Ganges and the Indus, with Indian civilisation ; and lastly the

209

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

Nile Valley and Mesopotamia with Egyptian and Sumerian
civilisation. The last three foci may have first appeared almost
at the same period, the first two were much later. But they were
all largely independent of one another, each struggling blindly
to spread and ramify, as though it were alone destined to absorb
and transform the earth.

Basically can we not say that the essential diing in history
consists in the conflict and finally the gradual harmonisation of
these great psycho-somatic currents ?

In fact this struggle for influence was quickly localised. The
Maya centre which was too isolated in the New World, and
the Polynesian centre which was too dispersed on the mono-
tonous dust of its distant islands, soon met their respective fates,
one being completely extinguished and the other radiating in
a vacuum. So finally the contest for the future of the world
was fought out by the agricultural plain dwellers of Asia and
North Africa. One or two thousand years before our era the
odds between them may have seemed fairly equal. But we
today, in the light of events, can sec that even at that stage
there were the seeds of weakness in two of the contestants in
the East.

Either by its own genius or as an effect of immensity, China
(and I mean the old China, of course) lacked both the inclination
and the impetus for deep renovation. A singular spectacle is
presented by this gigantic country which only yesterday repre-
sented — still living under our eyes — a scarcely changed fragment
of the world as it could have been ten thousand years ago. The
population was not only fundamentally agricultural but essentially
organised according to the hierarchy of territorial possessions —
the emperor being nothing more than the biggest proprietor.
It was a population ultra-specialised in brick work, pottery and
bronze, a population carrying to the lengths of superstition the
study of pictograms and the science of the constellations ; an
incredibly refined civilisation, admittedly, but unchanged as to
method since its beginning, like the writing which betrays the
fact so ingenuously. Well into the nineteenth century it was

210

THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERB

still Neolithic, not rejuvenated, as elsewhere, but simply inter-
minably complicated in on itself, not merely continuing on the
same lines, but remaining on the same level, as though unable
to life itself above the soil where it was formed.

And while China, already encrusted in its soil, multiplied
its gropings and discoveries without ever taking the trouble to
build up a science of physics, India allowed itself to be drawn
into metaphysics, only to become lost there. India — the region
par excellence of high philosophic and religious pressures : we
can never make too much of our indebtedness to the mystic
influences which have come down to each and all of us in the
past from this ' anticyclone '. But however efficacious these
currents for ventilating and illuminating the atmosphere of
mankind, we have to recognise that, with their excessive passivity
and detachment, they were incapable of building the world.
The primitive soul of India arose in its hour like a great wind
but, like a great wind also, again in its hour, it passed away.
How indeed could it have been otherwise ? Phenomena regarded
as an illusion (Maya) and their connections as a chain (Karma),
what was left in these doctrines to aiumate and direct human
evolution ? A simple mistake was made — but it was enough —
in the definition of the spirit and in the appreciation of the
bonds which attach it to the sublimations of matter.

Then step by step we are driven nearer to the more western
zones of the world — to the Euphrates, the Nile, the Mediter-
ranean — where an exceptional concurrence of places and peoples
was, in the course of a few thousand years, to produce that happy
blend, thanks to which reason could be harnessed to facts and
religion to action. And this without losing any of their up-
ward thrust — in fact quite the contrary. Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Greece — with Rome soon to be added — and above all the
mysterious Judaeo-Christian ferment which gave Europe its
spiritual form. But I shall be coming back to that at the end of
this book.

It is easy for the pessimist to reduce this extraordinary period
to a number of civilisations which have fallen into ruins one after

211

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

the other. Is it not far more scientific to recognise, yet once again,
beneath these successive oscillations, the great spiral of life :
thrusting up, irreversibly, in relays, following the master-line
of its evolution ? Susa, Memphis and Athens can crumble.
An ever more highly organised consciousness of the universe
is passed from hand to hand, and glows steadily brighter.

Later on, when I come to speak of the current planetisation
of the noosphere, I shall try to restore to the other fragments of
mankind the great and essential part reserved for them in the
expected plenitude of the earth. At this point of our investiga-
tion, we would be allowing sentiment to falsify the facts if we
failed to recognise that during historic time the principal axis
of anthropogenesis has passed through the West. It is in this
ardent zone of growth and universal recasting that all that goes
to make man today has been discovered, or at any rate must
have been rediscovered. For even that which had long been known
elsewhere only took on its definitive human value in becoming
incorporated in the system of European ideas and activities. It
is not in any way naive to hail as a great event the discovery by
Columbus of America.

In truth, a neo-humanity has been germinating round the
Mediterranean during the last six thousand years, and precisely
at this moment it has finished absorbing the last vestiges of the
Neolithic mosaic; thus starts the budding of another layer on the
noosphere, and the densest of all.

The proof of this lies in the fact that from one end of the
world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to
become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and
problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which
the West has formulated them.

212

CHAPTER THREE

THE MODERN EARTH

A Change of Age

In every epoch man has thought himself at a ' turning-point
of history '. And to a certain extent, as he is advancing on a
rising spiral, he has not been wrong. But there are moments
when this impression of transformation becomes accentuated
and is thus particularly justified. And we are certainly not
exaggerating the importance of our contemporary existences in
estimating that, upon them, a turn of profound importance is
taking place in the world which may even crush them.

When did this turn begin ? It is naturally impossible to say
exactly. Like a great ship, the human mass only changes its
course gradually, so much so that we can put far back — at least
as far as the Renaissance — the first vibrations which indicate the
change of route. It is clear, at any rate, that at the end of the
eighteenth century the course had been changed in the West.
Since then, in spite of our occasional obstinacy in pretending
that we are the same, we have in fact entered a different world.

Firstly, economic changes. Advanced as it was in many
ways two centuries ago, our civilisation was still based funda-
mentally on the soil and its partition. The type of ' real ' pro-
perty, the nucleus of the family, the prototype of the state (and
even the universe) was still, as in the earliest days of society, the
arable field, the territorial basis. Then, little by little, as a result
of the ' dynamisation ' of money, property has evaporated into
something fluid and impersonal, so mobile that already the

213

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

wealth of nations themselves has almost nothing in common with
their frontiers.

Secondly, industrial changes. Up to the eighteenth century,
in spite of the many improvements made, there was still only
one known source of chemical energy — fire. And there was
only one sort of mechanical energy employed — muscle, human
or animal, multiplied by the machine.

Lastly, social changes and the awakening of the masses.

Merely from looking at these external signs wc can hardly
fail to suspect that the great unrest which has pervaded our life
in the West ever since the storm of the French Revolution springs
from a nobler and deeper cause than the difficulties of a world
seeking to recover some ancient equilibrium that it has lost.
There is no question of shipwreck. What wc are up against is
the heavy swell of an unknown sea which we are just entering
from behind the cape that protected us. What is troubling us
intellectually, politicaUy and even spiritually is something quite
simple. With his customary acute intuition, Henri Breuil said
to me one day: ' We have only just cast off the last moorings
which held us to the Neolithic age.' The formula is paradoxical
but illuminating. In fact the more I have thought over these
words, the more inclined I have been to think that Breuil was
right.

We are, at this very moment, passing through a change of age.

The age of industry ; the age of oil, electricity and the atom ;
the age of the machine, of huge collectivities and of science —
the future will decide what is the best name to describe the era
we are entering. The word matters little. What does matter is
that wc should be told that, at the cost of what we arc enduring,
life is taking a step, and a decisive step, in us and in our environ-
ment. After the long maturation that has been steadily going
on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural centuries,
the hour has come at last, characterised by the birth pangs
inevitable in another change of state. There were the first men —
those who witnessed our origin. There are others who will
witness the great scenes of the end. To us, in our brief span of

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THE MODERN EARTH

life, falls the honour and good fortune of coinciding with a
critical change of the noosphere.

In these confused and restless zones in which present blends
with future in a world of upheaval, we stand face to face with
all the grandeur, the unprecendented grandeur, of the pheno-
menon of man. Here if anywhere, now if ever, have we, more
legitimately than any of our predecessors, the right to think
that we can measure the importance and detect the direction of
the process of hominisation. Let us look carefully and try to
understand. And to do so let us probe beneath the surface and
try to decipher the particular form of mind which is coming
to birth in the womb of the earth today.

Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with
work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations
— this great organism lives, in fmal analysis, only because of, and
for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath a change of age lies a change
of thought. Where arc we to look for it, where arc we to
situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without
appreciably changing our bodies, has made new creatures of
us ? In one place and one only — in a new intuition involving a
total change in the physiognomy of the universe in which we
move — in other words, in an awakening.

What has made us in four or five generations so different
from our forebears (in spite of all that may be said), so ambitious
too, and so worried, is not merely that wc have discovered and
mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am
not mistaken, that we have become conscious of the movement
which is carrying us along, and have thereby realised the for-
midable problems set us by this reflective exercise of the human
effort.

215

i. THE DISCOVERY OF EVOLUTION

A. The Perception of Space-time 1

We have all forgotten the moment when, opening our eyes for
the first time, we saw light and things around us all jumbled
up and all on one single plane. It requires a great effort to
imagine the time when we were unable to read or again to take
our minds back to the time when for us the world extended
no farther than the walls of our home and our family circle.

Similarly it seems to us incredible that men could have lived
without suspecting that the stars are hung above us hundreds of
light years away, or that the contours of life stretched out
millions of years behind us to the limits of our horizon. Yet
we have only to open any of those books with barely yellowing
pages in which the authors of the sixteenth, or even as late as
the eighteenth, century discoursed on the structure of worlds to
be startled by the fact that our great-great-great-grandfathers
felt perfectly at ease in a cubic space where the stars turned round
the earth, and had been doing so for less than 6,000 years. In a
cosmic atmosphere which would suffocate us from the first
moment, and in perspectives in which it is physically impossible
for us to enter, they breathed without any inconvenience, if not
very deeply.

Between them and us what, then, has happened ?

I know of no more moving story nor any more revealing of
the biological reality of a noogenesis than that of intelligence
struggling step by step from the beginning to overcome the
encircling illusion of proximity.

In the course of this struggle to master the dimensions and
the relief of the universe, space was the first to yield — naturally,
because it was more tangible. In fact the first hurdle was taken
in this field when long, long ago a man (some Greek, no doubt,
before Aristotle), bending back on itself the apparent flatness of
p Cf. Collingwood, Idea of Nature (O.U.P. 1944) passim]

2l6

THE MODERN EARTH

things, had an intuition that there were antipodes. From then
onwards round the round earth the firmament itself rolled
roundly. But the focus of the spheres was badly placed. By
its situation it incurably paralysed the elasticity of the system.
It was only really in the time of Galileo, through rupture with
the ancient geocentric view, that the skies were made free for
the boundless expansions which we have since detected in them.
The earth became a mere speck of sidereal dust. Immensity
became possible, and to balance it the infinitesimal sprang into
existence.

For lack of apparent yardsticks, the depths of the past took
much longer to be plumbed. The movement of stars, the shape
of mountains, the chemical nature of bodies — indeed all matter
seemed to express a continual present. The physics of the
seventeenth century was incapable of opening Pascal's eyes to
the abysses of the past. To discover the real age of the earth
and then of the elements, it was necessary for man to become
fortuitously interested in an object of moderate mobility, such
as life, for instance, or even volcanoes. It was thus through a
narrow crack (that of natural history ', then in its infancy) that
from the eighteenth century onwards light began to seep down
into the great depths beneath our feet. In these initial estimates,
the time considered necessary for the formation of the world
was still very modest. But at least the impetus had been given
and the way out opened up. After the walls of space, shaken
by the Renaissance, it was the floor (and consequently the
ceiling) of time which, from Buffon onwards, became mobile.
Since then, under the unceasing pressure of facts, the process
has continually accelerated. Although the strain has been taken
off for close on two hundred years, the spirals of the world have
still not been relaxed. The distance between the turns in the spiral
has seemed ever greater and there have always been further turns
appearing deeper still.

Yet in these first stages in man's awakening to the immensi-
ties of the cosmos, space and time, however vast, still remained
homogeneous and independent of each other ; they were two

217

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

great containers, quite separate one from the other, extending
infinitely no doubt, but in which things floated about or were
packed together in ways owing nothing to the nature of their

setting.

The two compartments had been enlarged beyond measure,
but within each of them the objects seemed as freely transpose
as before. It seemed as if they could be placed here or there,
moved forward, pushed back or even suppressed at will. If no-one
ventured formally as far as this play of thought, at least there was
still no clear idea why or to what extent it was impossible.
This was a question which did not arise.

It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century, again
under the influence of biology, that the light dawned at last,
revealing the irreversible coherence of all that exists. First the
concatenations of life and, soon after, those of matter The least
molecule is, in nature and in position, a function of the whole
sidereal process, and the least of the protozoa is structurally so
knit into the web of life that its existence cannot be hypothctically
annihilated without ipso facto undoing the whole network of the
biosphere. The distribution, succession and solidarity of objects
are bom from their concrescence iu a common genesis. Time and space
are organically joined again so as to weave, together, the stuff
of the universe. That is the point we have reached and how we
perceive things today.

Psychologically what is hidden behind this initiation ? One
might well become impatient or lose heart at the sight of so
many minds (and not mediocre ones either) remaining today
still closed to idea of evolution, if the whole of history were
not there to pledge to us that a truth once seen, even by a single
mind, always ends up by imposing itself on the totality of human
consciousness. For many, evolution is still only transformism,
and transformism is only an old Darwinian hypothesis as local
and as dated as Laplace's conception of the solar system or
Wegener's Theory of Continental Drift. Blind indeed are those
who do not see the sweep of a movement whose orbit infinitely
transcends the natural sciences and has successively invaded and

218

THE MODERN EARTH

conquered the surrounding territory — chemistry, physics, socio-
logy and even mathematics and the history of religions. One
after the other all the fields of human knowledge have been
shaken and carried away by the same under-watcr current in
the direction of the study of some development. Is evolution a
theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general
condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must
bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be
thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a
curve that all lines must follow.

In the last century and a half the most prodigious event,
perhaps, ever recorded by history since the threshold of reflection
has been taking place in our minds : the definitive access of
consciousness to a scale of new dimensions ; and in consequence
the birth of an entirely renewed universe, without any change
of line or feature by the simple transformation of its intimate
substance.

Until that time the world seemed to rest, static and fragment-
able, on the three axes of its geometry. Now it is a casting from
a single mould.

What makes and classifies a ' modern ' man (and a whole
host of our contemporaries is not yet ' modern ' in this sense)
is having become capable of seeing in terms not of space and
time alone, but also of duration, or — it comes to the same
thing — of biological space-time ; and above all having become
incapable of seeing anything otherwise — anything — not even
himself.

This last step brings us to the heart of the metamorphosis.

b. The Envelopment in Duration

Obviously man could not see evolution all around him without
feeling to some extent carried along by it himself. Darwin has
demonstrated this. Nevertheless, looking at the progress of
transformist views in the last hundred years, we are surprised

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

to see how naively naturalists and physicists were able at the
early stages to imagine themselves to be standing outside the
universal stream they had just discovered. Almost incurably
subject and object tend to become separated from each other in
the act of knowing. We are continually inclined to isolate our-
selves from the things and events which surround us, as though
we were looking at them from outside, from the shelter of an
observatory into which they were unable to enter, as though
we were spectators, not elements, in what goes on. That is why,
when it was raised by the concatenations of life, the question of
man's origins was for so long restricted to the purely somatic
and bodily side. A long animal heredity might well have formed
our limbs, but our mind was always above the play of which it
kept the score. However materialistic they might be, it did not
occur to the first evolutionists that their scientific intelligence
had anything to do in itself with evolution.

At this stage they were only half-way to the truth they had

discovered. .

From the very first pages of this book, 1 have been relentlessly
insisting on one thing : for invincible reasons of homogeneity
and coherence, the fibres of cosmogenesis demand their pro-
longation in us in a way that goes far deeper than flesh and blood.
We are not only set adrift and carried away in the current of life
by the material surface of our being ; but, like a subtle fluid,
space-time first drowns our bodies and then penetrates to our
soul ; it fills it and impregnates it ; it blends itself with the
soul's potentialities to such an extent that soon the soul no
longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own
thoughts. To those who can use their eyes nothing, not even at
the summit of our being, can escape this flux any longer, because
it is only definable in increase of consciousness. The very act by
which the fine edge of our minds penetrates the absolute is a
phenomenon, as it were, of emergence. In short, first recognised
only at a single point, then perforce extended to the whole
inorganic and organic volume of matter, evolution is now,
whether we like it or not, gaining the psychic zones of the world

220

THE MODERN EARTH

and transferring to the spiritual constructions of life not only the
cosmic stuff but also the cosmic ' primacy ' hitherto reserved by
science to the tangled whirlwind of the ancient ' ether'.

How indeed could we incorporate thought into the organic
flux of space-time without being forced to grant it the first place
in the processus ? How could we imagine a cosmogenesis
reaching right up to mind without being thereby confronted
with a noogenesis ?

Thus we see not only thought as participating in evolution
as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon ; but evolution as so
reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought
that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very
stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is
nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself, to borrow
Julian Huxley's striking expression. It seems to me that our
modern minds (because and inasmuch as they are modern)
will never find rest until they settle down to this view. On
this summit and on this summit alone are repose and illumination
waiting for us.

c. The Illumination

The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself
and reflecting upon itself.

With that very simple view, destined, as I suppose, to become
as instinctive and familiar to our descendants as the discovery
of a third dimension in space is to a baby, a new light — inex-
haustibly harmonious — bursts upon the world, radiating from
ourselves.

Step by step, from the early earth onwards, we have followed
going upwards the successive advances of consciousness in matter
undergoing organisation. Having reached die peak, we can
now turn round and, looking downwards, take in the pattern of
the whole. And this second check is decisive, the harmony
is perfect. From any other point of view, there is always a

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

' snag ' : something clashes, for there is no natural place no
generic place — for human thought in the landscape. Whereas
here, from top to bottom, from our souls and including our souls,
the lines stretch in both directions, untwisted and unbroken.
From top to bottom, a triple unity persists and develops : unity
of structure, unity of mechanism and unity of movement.
a. Unity of structure. ' Verticils ' and ' farmings out '.

On every scale, this is the pattern we see on the tree of life.
We found it again at the origins of mankind and of the principal
human waves. We have seen it with our own eyes today in the
complex ramifications of nations and races. And now, with an
eye rendered more sensitive by training, we shall be able to
discern the same pattern again in forms which are more and more
immaterial and near.

Our habit is to divide up our human world into compart-
ments of different sorts of ' realities ' : natural and artificial,
physical and moral, organic and juridical, for instance.

In a space-time, legitimately and perforce extended to
include the movements of the mind within us, the frontiers
between these pairs of opposites tend to vanish. Is there after all
such a great difference from the point of view of the expansion
of life between a vertebrate either spreading its limbs or equipping
them with feathers, and an aviator soaring on wings with which
he has had the ingenuity to provide himself ? In what way is the
ineluctable play of the energies of the heart less physically real
than the principle of universal attraction ? And, conventional
and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the
intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate litde by
litde what are one day to become the structural laws of the noo-
sphere ? In their essence, and provided they keep their vital
connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the
past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the
hominised versions of the natural, the physical and the organic ?

From this point of view, which is that of the future natural
history of the world, distinctions we cling to from habit (at
die risk of over-partitioning the world) lose their value. Hence

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THE MODERN EARTH

the ramifications of evolution reappear and go on close to us in a
thousand social phenomena which we should never have imagined
to be so closely linked with biology ; in the formation and dis-
semination of languages, in the development and specialisation
of new industries, in the formulation and propagation of philo-
sophic and religious doctrines. In each of these groups of human
activity a superficial glance would only detect a weak and hap-
hazard reproduction of the procedures of life. It would accept
without questioning the strange fact of parallelism— or it would
account verbally for it in terms of some abstract necessity.

For a mind that has awakened to the full meaning of evolu-
tion, mere inexplicable similitude is resolved in identity— the
identity of a structure which, under different forms, extends
from the bottom to the top, from threshold to threshold, from
the roots to the flowers— by the organic continuity of move-
ment or, which amounts to the same thing, by the organic unity
of milieu.

The social phenomenon is the culmination and not the attenuation
of the biological phenomenon,
b. Unity of mechanism. ' Groping ' and ' invention '.

It was to these words that we turned instinctively when we
ran up against the facts of ' mutations ' in describing the appear-
ance of successive zoological groups.

What exactly are these words worth, imbued as they may
well be with anthropomorphism ?

Mutation reappears undeniably at the origin of the ramifi-
cations of institutions and ideas which interlace to form human
society. Everywhere around us it is constandy cropping up,
and precisely under the two forms that biology has divined and
between which it hesitates : on the one hand we have mutations
narrowly limited round a single focus ; on the other ' mass
mutations ' in which whole blocks of mankind are swept along as
by a flood. Here, however, because the phenomenon takes place
in ourselves with its procedure in full view, we cannot be
mistaken : we can see that in interpreting the progressive leaps
of life in an active and finalist way we are not in error. For if

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

our ' artificial ' constructions are really nothing but the legitimate
sequel to our phylogenesis, invention also — this revolutionary act
from which the creations of our thought emerge one after the
other — can legitimately be regarded as an extension in reflective
form of the obscure mechanism whereby each new form has
always germinated on the trunk of life.

This is no metaphor, but an analogy founded in nature. We
find the same thing in both — only it is easier to define in the
hominised state.

And so, here again, we find that light reflected on itself,
glancing off and in a flash descending to the lowest frontiers of
the past. But this time what its beam illuminates in us at our
lowest stages is no longer an endless play of tangled verticils, but
a long sequence of discoveries. In the same beam of light the
instinctive gropings of the first cell link up with the learned
gropings of our laboratories. So let us bow our heads with
respect for the anxieties and joys of ' trying all and discovering
all '. The passing wave that we can feci was not formed in
ourselves. It comes to us from far away ; it set out at the same
time as the light from the first stars. It reaches us after creating
everything on the way. The spirit of research and conquest is
the permanent soul of evolution.

c. And hence, throughout all time, unity of movement. ' The
rise and expansion of consciousness.'

Man is not the centre of the universe as once we thought in
our simplicity, but something much more wonderful — the arrow
pointing the way to the final unification of the world in terms of
life. Man alone constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most
complicated, the most subdc of all the successive layers of life.

This is nothing else than the fundamental vision and I shall
leave it at that.

But this vision, mind you, only acquires its full value — is
indeed only defensible — through the simultaneous illumination
within ourselves of the laws and conditions of heredity.

As I have already had occasion to say, we do not yet know
how characters are formed, accumulated and transmitted in the

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THE MODERN EARTH

secret recesses of the germ cells. Or rather, so long as it is talking
of plants and animals, biology has not yet found a way of recon-
ciling in phy ogenesis the spontaneous activity of individuals
with the blind determinism of the genes. In its inability to do
so it is inclined to make the living being the passive and power-
less witness of the transformations he undergoes-without being
able to influence them and without being responsible for them

But then (and this is the moment to settle the question once
and for all), m the phylogenesis of mankind, what becomes of
the part, obvious enough, played by the power of invention ?

What evolution perceives of itself in man by reflecting itself
m him is enough to dispel or at least to correct these paradoxical
appearances.

Certainly in our innermost being we all feel the weight,
the stock of obscure powers, good or bad, a sort of definite and
unalterable quantum * handed down to us once and for all
from the past. But with no less clarity we see that the further
advance of the vital wave beyond us depends on how industri-
ously we use those powers. How could we doubt this when
we see them directly before us, through all the channels of ' tradi-
tion , stored up irreversibly in the highest form of life accessible
to our expenence-I mean the collective memory and intelligence
of the human biota ? Ever under the influence of our tendency
to disparage the ' artificial ', we are apt to regard these social
functions— tradition, education and upbringing— as pale images,
almost parodies, of what takes place in the natural formation of
species. If the noosphere is not an illusion, is it not much more
exact to recognise in these communications and exchanges of
ideas the higher form, in which they come to be fixed in us, of
the less supple modes of biological enrichments by additivity?

In short, the further the living being emerges from the
anonymous masses by the radiation of his own consciousness,
the greater becomes the part of his activity which can be stored
up and transmitted by means of education and imitation. From
this point of view man only represents an extreme case of trans-
formation. Transplanted by man into the thinking layer of the

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THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

earth, heredity, without ceasing to be germinal (or chromo-
somatic) in the individual, finds itself, by its very life-centre,
settled in a reflecting organism, collective and permanent, in
which phylogenesis merges with ontogenesis. From the chain
of cells it passes into the circumterrestrial layers of the noosphere.
There is nothing surprising if from this moment onwards, and
thanks to the characters of this new milieu, it is reduced in its
finest part to the pure and simple transmission of acquired spiritual
treasures.

Passive as it may have been before reflection, heredity now
springs to life, supremely active, in its noospheric form — that is
to sav, by becoming hominised.

Hence we were not saying enough when we said that
evolution, by becoming conscious of itself in the depths of our-
selves, only needs to look at itself in the mirror to perceive itself
in all its depths and to decipher itself. In addition it becomes
free to dispose of itself— it can give itself or refuse itself. Not
only do we read in our slightest acts the secret of its proceedings ;
but for an elementary part we hold it in our hands, responsible
for its past to its future.

Is this grandeur or servitude ? Therein lies the whole problem
of action.

2. THE PROBLEM OF ACTION

A. Modern Disquiet

It is impossible to accede to a fundamentally new environment
without experiencing the inner terrors of a metamorphosis. The
child is terrified when it opens its eyes for the first time. Similarly,
for our mind to adjust itself to lines and horizons enlarged beyond
measure, it must renounce the comfort of familiar narrowness.
It must create a new equilibrium for everything that had formerly
been so neatly arranged in its small inner world. It is dazzled
when it emerges from its dark prison, awed to find itself suddenly

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THE MODERN EARTH

at the top of a tower, and it suffers from giddiness and disorienta-
tion. The whole psychology of modern disquiet is linked with
the sudden confrontation with space-time.

It cannot be denied that, in a primordial form, human anxiety
is bound up with the very advent of reflection and is thus as
old as man himself. Nor do I think that anyone can seriously
doubt the fact that, under the influence of reflection undergoing
socialisation, the men of today are particularly uneasy, more so
than at any other moment of history. Conscious or not, anguish
-a fundamental anguish of being-despite our smiles, strikes in
the depths of all our hearts and is the undertone of all our con-
versations. This does not mean that its cause is clearly recognised
-far from it. Something threatens us, something is more than
ever lacking, but without our being able to say exactly what.

Let us try then, step by step, to localise the source of our
disquiet, eliminating the illegitimate causes of disturbance till we
find the exact site of the pain at which the remedy, if there is one,
should be applied.

hi the first and most widespread degree, the ' malady of
space-tune ' manifests itself as a rule by a feeling of futility, of
being crushed by the enormities of the cosmos.

The enormity of space is the most tangible and thus the most
frightening aspect. Which of us has ever in his life really had the
courage to look squarely at and try to ' live * a universe formed
of galaxies whose distance apart runs into hundreds of thousands
of light years ? Which of us, having tried, has not emerged from
the ordeal shaken in one or other of his beliefs ? And who, even
when trying to shut his eyes as best he can to what the astronomers
implacably put before us, has not had a confused sensation of a
gigantic shadow passing over the serenity of his joy ?

Enormity of duration— sometimes having the effect of an
abyss on those few who are able to see it, and at other times
more usually (on those whose sight is poor), the despairing effect
of stability and monotony. Events that follow one anodier in
a circle, vague pathways which intertwine, leading nowhere.
Corresponding enormity of number— the bewildering number

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

of all that has been, is, and will be necessary to fill time and
space. An ocean in which we seem to dissolve all the more
irresistibly the more lucidly alive we are. The effort of trying
conscientiously to find our proper place among a thousand
million men. Or merely in a crowd.

Malady of multitude and immensity .. .
To overcome this first form of its uneasiness, I believe that
the modern world has no choice but to proceed unhesitatingly
right to the end of its intuition.

As motionless or blind (and by that I mean so long as we
think of them as motionless or blind) time and space are indeed
terrifying. Accordingly what could make our initiation into the
true dimensions of the world dangerous is for it to remain
incomplete, deprived of its complement and necessary corrective
—the perception of an evolution animating those dimensions.
On the other hand, what matters the giddy plurality of the stars
and their fantastic spread, if that immensity (symmetrical with
the infinitesimal) has no other function but to equilibrate the
intermediary layer where, and where only in the medium range of
size, life can build itself up chemically ? What matter the millions
of years and milliards of beings that have gone before if those
countless drops form a current that carries us along ? Our
consciousness would evaporate, as though annihilated, in the
limitless expansions of a static or endlessly moving universe.
It is inwardly reinforced in a flux which, incredibly vast as it may
be, is not only becoming but genesis, which is something quite
different. Indeed time and space become humanised as soon as a
definite movement appears which gives them a physiognomy.

' There is nothing new under the sun ' say the despairing.
But what about you, O thinking man ? Unless you repudiate
reflection, you must admit that you have climbed a step higher
than the animals. ' Very well, but at least nothing has changed
and nothing is changing any longer since the beginning of
history.' In that case, O man of the twentieth century, how does
it happen that you are waking up to horizons and are susceptible
to fears that your forefathers never knew ?

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THE MODERN EARTH

In truth, half our present uneasiness would be turned into
happiness if we could once make up our minds to accept the
facts and place the essence and the measure of our modern
cosmogonies within a noogenesis. Along this axis no doubt is
possible. The universe has always been in motion and at this
moment continues to be in motion. But will it still be in motion
tomorrow ?

Here only, at this turning point where the future substitutes
itself for the present and the observations of science should give
way to the anticipations of a faith, do our perplexities legitimately
and indeed inevitably begin. Tomorrow ? But who can guaran-
tee us a tomorrow anyway ? And without the assurance that
this tomorrow exists, can we really go on living, we to whom
has been given — perhaps for the first time in the whole story of
the universe — the terrible gift of foresight ?

Sickness of die dead end — the anguish of feeling shut in . . .

This time we have at last put our finger on the tender spot.

What makes the world in which we live specifically modern
is our discovery in it and around it of evolution. And I can
now add that what disconcerts the modern world at its very
roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be
sure, that there is an outcome — a suitable outcome — to that evolu-
tion.

Now what should the future be like in order to give us the
strength or even die joy to accept the prospect of it and bear
its weight ?

To come to grips with the problem and see if there is a
remedy, let us examine the whole situation.

b. The Requirements of the Future

There was a time when life held sway over none but slaves and
children. To advance, all it needed was to feed obscure instincts
— the bait of food, the urge of reproduction, the half-confused
struggle for a place in the sun, stepping over others, trampling

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

them down if need be. The aggregate rose automatically and
docile, as the resultant of an enormous sum of egoisms given
rein. There was a time too, almost within living memory,
when the workers and the disinherited accepted without reflec-
tion the lot which kept them in servitude to the remainder
of society.

Yet when the first spark of thought appeared upon the earth,
life found it had brought into the world a power capable of
criticising it and judging it. Tins formidable risk which long
lay dormant, but whose dangers burst out with our first awaken-
ing to the idea of evolution. Like sons who have grown up,
like workers who have become ' conscious ', we are discovering
that something is developing in the world by means of us,
perhaps at our expense. And what is more serious still is that
we have become aware that, in the great game that is being
played, we are the players as well as being the cards and the
stakes. Nothing can go on if we leave the table. Neither can
any power force us to remain. Is the game worth the candle, or
are we simply its dupes ? This question has hardly been formu-
lated as yet in man's heart, accustomed for hundreds of centuries
to toe the line ; it is a question, however, whose mere murmur,
already audible, infallibly predicts future rumblings. The last
century witnessed the first systematic strikes in industry ; the
next will surely not pass without the threat of strikes in the
noosphere.

There is a danger that the elements of the world should
refuse to serve the world — because they think ; or more pre-
cisely that the world should refuse itself when perceiving itself
through reflection. Under our modern disquiet, what is forming
and growing is nothing less than an organic crisis in evolution.

And now, at what price and on what contractual bases will
order be restored ? On all the evidence, that is the nub of the
problem.

In the critical disposition of mind we shall be in from now
on, one thing is clear. We shall never bend our backs to the
task that has been allotted us of pushing noogenesis onward except

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THE MODERN EARTH

on condition that the effort demanded of us has a chance of
succeeding and of taking us as far as possible. An animal may
rush headlong down a blind alley or towards a precipice. Man
will never take a step in a direction he knows to be blocked.
There lies precisely the ill that causes our disquiet.

Having got so far, what are the minimum requirements to
be fulfilled before we can say that the road ahead of us is open ?
There is only one, but it is everything. It is that we should be
assured the space and the chances to fulfil ourselves, that is to
say, to progress till we arrive (directly or indirectly, individually
or collectively) at the utmost limits of ourselves. This is an
elementary request, a basic wage, so to speak, veiling neverthe-
less a stupendous demand. But is not the end and aim of thought
that still unimaginable farthest limit of a convergent sequence,
propagating itself without end and ever higher ? Does not the
end or confine of thought consist precisely in not having a
confine ? Unique in this respect among all the energies of the
universe, consciousness is a dimension to which it is inconceiv-
able and even contradictory to ascribe a ceiling or to suppose
that it can double back upon itself. There are innumerable
critical points on the way, but a halt or a reversion is impossible,
and for the simple reason that every increase of internal vision
is essentially the germ of a further vision which includes all the
others and carries still farther on.

Hence this remarkable situation — that our mind, by the very
fact of being able to discern infinite horizons ahead, is only
able to move by the hope of achieving, through something of
itself, a supreme consummation — without which it would rightly
feel itself to be stunted, frustrated and cheated. By the nature
of the work, and correlativcly by the requirement [exyj<?M«] of
the worker, a total death, an unscalable wall, on which con-
sciousness would crash and then for ever disappear, are thus ' in-
compossible ' with the mechanism of conscious activity (since it
would immediately break its mainspring).

The more man becomes man, the less will he be prepared to
move except towards that which is interminably and indes-

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

tructibly new. Some ' absolute ' is implied in the very play of
his operative activity.

After that, ' positive and critical ' minds can go on saying as
much as they like that ihe new generation, less ingenuous than
their elders, no longer believes in a future and in a perfecting
of the world. Has it even occurred to those who write and
repeat these tilings that, if they were right, all spiritual move-
ment on earth would be virtually brought to a stop ? They
seem to believe that life would continue its peaceful cycle when
deprived of light, of hope and of the attraction of an inexhaust-
ible future. And this is a great mistake. Flowers and fruit might
still go on perhaps for a few years more by habit. But from
these roots the trunk would be well and truly severed. Even
on stacks of material energy, even under the spur of immediate
fear or desire, without the taste for life, mankind would soon stop
inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed
in advance. And, stricken at the very source of the impetus
which sustains it, it would disintegrate from nausea or revolt
and crumble into dust.

Having once known the taste of a universal and durable
progress, we can never banish it from our minds any more than
our intelligence can escape from the space-time perspective it
once has glimpsed.

If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work
involved we can say : ' What's the good of it all ? ' our efforts
will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a
halt — because we are evolution. 1

c. The Dilemma and the Choice

And now, by the very fact that we have measured the truly
cosmic gravity of the sickness that disquiets us, we are put in

1 There is no such thing as the ' energy of despair ' in spice of what is some-
times said. What those words really mean is a paroxysm of hope against hope.
All conscious energy is, like love (and because it is love), founded on hope.

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THE MODERN EARTH

possession of the remedy that can cure it. ' After the long series
of transformations leading to man, has the world stopped ? Or,
if we are still moving, is it not merely in a circle ? '

The answer to that uneasiness of the modern world springs
up by itself when we formulate the dilemma in which the
analysis of our action has imprisoned us.

Either nature is closed to our demands for futurity, in which
case thought, the fruit of millions of years of effort, is stifled,
still-born in a self-abortive and absurd universe. Or else an
opening exists— that of the super-soul above our souls ; but
in that case the way out, if we are to agree to embark on it, must
open out freely onto limitless psychic spaces in a universe to
which we can unhesitatingly entrust ourselves.

Between these two alternatives of absolute optimism or
absolute pessimism, there is no middle way because by its very
nature progress is all or nothing. We are confronted accordingly
with two directions and only two : one upwards and the
other downwards, and there is no possibility of finding a half-
way house.

On neither side is there any tangible evidence to produce.
Only, in support of hope, there are rational invitations to an
act of faith.

At this cross-roads where we cannot stop and wait because we
are pushed forward by life— and obliged to adopt an attitude
if we want to go on doing anything whatsoever — what are we
going freely to decide ?

To determine man's choice, in his famous wager, Pascal
loaded the dice with the lure of boundless gain. Here, when
one of die alternatives is weighted with logic and, in a sense,
by the promise of a whole world, can we still speak of a simple
game of chance ? Have we the right to hesitate ?

The world is too big a concern for that. To bring us into
existence it has from the beginning juggled miraculously with
too many improbabilities for there to be any risk whatever in
committing ourselves further and following it right to the end.
If it undertook the task, it is because it can finish it, following

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

the same methods and with the same infallibility with which
it began.

In last analysis the best guarantee that a thing should happen
is that it appears to us as vitally necessary.

We have said that life, by its very structure, having once
been lifted to its stage of thought, cannot go on at all without <s T I B wivai

requiring to ascend ever higher.

This is enough for us to be assured of the two points of which
our action has immediate need.

The first is that there is for us, in the future, under some
form or another, at least collective, not only survival but also
super-life.

The second is that, to imagine, discover and reach this
superior form of existence, we have only to think and to walk
always further in the direction in which the lines passed by evolu-
tion take on their maximum coherence.

^34

CHAPTER ONE

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

Preliminary Observation :
A Blind Alley to be Avoided : Isolation

When man has realised that he carries the world's fortune in
himself and that a limitless future stretches before him in which
lie cannot founder, his first reflex often leads him along the
dangerous course of seeking fulfilment in isolation.

In one example of this — flattering to our private egotism —
some innate instinct, justified by reflection, inclines us to think
that to give ourselves full scope we must break away as far as
possible from the crowd of others. Is it not in our aloofness from
our fellows, or alternatively in their subjection to ourselves,
that we will find that ' utmost limit of ourselves ' which is our
declared goal ? The study of the past teaches us that, with the
onset of reflection, an element partially liberated from phyletic
servitudes began to live for itself. So is it not in a line continuous
with that initial emancipation that further advance must lie?
To be more alone so as to increase one's being. Like some radiat-
ing substance, mankind would in this case culminate in a dust
of active, dissociated particles. This doubdess would not mean
diat a cluster of sparks would be extinguished in darkness, for
that would involve the total death whose hypothesis we have
just eliminated by our fundamental option. Rather it would
involve the hope that, in the long run, some rays, more pene-
trating or luckier than others, would finish up by finding the
path sought from the outset by consciousness, groping for

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

its consummation. Concentration by decentration from the
rest ; solitary, and by dint of solitude the elements of the noo-
sphere capable of being saved would find their salvation at the
extreme limit of, and by the very excess of, their individualisation.

It is rare around us for extreme individualism to go beyond
the bounds of a philosophy of immediate enjoyment and feel
the need to come to terms with the profound requirements of
action.

Less theoretical and less extreme, but all the more insidious,
is another doctrine of ' progress by isolation ' which, at this
very moment, is fascinating large sections of mankind — the
doctrine of the selection and election of races. Flattering to
collective egotism, keener, nobler and more easily aroused than
individual egotism, racialism lias the virtue in its perspectives
of accepting and extending rigorously, just as they occur, the
lines of the tree of life. What indeed does the history of the
animate world show us but a succession of ramifications, spring-
ing up one after the other, one on the top of the other, through
the success and domination of a privileged group ? And why
should we be exempt from the general rule ? Why should
there not be once again between us the struggle for life and the
survival of the fittest ; the trial of strength ? The super-man
should, like any other stem, be an offshoot from a single bud
of mankind.

Isolation of the individual or isolation of the group : here
we have two different forms of the same tactics, each seemingly
able to produce a plausible justification by pointing to the methods
pursued by life for its development right down to us.

We shall be seeing later wherein lies the attraction (or per-
versity) of these cynical and brutal theories in which, however,
a noble passion may also stir. We shall also see why, faced with
one or other of these calls to violence, we cannot help some-
times being deeply responsive. They involve a subtle deforma-
tion of a great truth.

What matters at the moment is to see clearly that those in
both groups deceive themselves, and us too, inasmuch as, ignoring

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THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

an essential phenomenon— the ' natural confluence of grains of
thought '—they disfigure or hide from our eyes the veritable
contours of the noosphere and render biologically impossible the
formation of a veritable spirit of the earth.

1. THE CONFLUENCE OF THOUGHT

A. Forced Coalescence

a. Coalescence of Elements. By their very nature, and at every
level of complexity, the elements of the world are able to influ-
ence and mutually to penetrate each other by their within, so
as to combine their ' radial energies ' in ' bundles '. While no
more than conjecturable in atoms and molecules, this psychic
interpenetrability grows and becomes directly perceptible in the
case of organised beings. Finally in man, in whom the effects of
consciousness attain the present maximum found in nature, it
reaches a high degree everywhere. It is written all over the
social phenomenon and is, of course, felt by us directly. But
at the same time, in this case also, it operates only in virtue of
the ' tangential energies ' of arrangement and thus under certain
conditions of spatial juxtaposition.

And here there intervenes a fact, commonplace at first sight,
but through which in reality there transpires one of the most
fundamental characteristics of the cosmic structure— the round-
ness of the earth. The geometrical limitation of a star closed, like
a gigantic molecule, upon itself. We have already regarded this
as a necessary feature at the origin of the first synthesis and
polymerisations on the early earth. Implictly, without our
having to say so, it has constantly sustained all the differentiations
and all the progress of the biosphere. But what are we to say of
its function in the noosphere ?

What would have become of humanity if, by some remote
chance, it had been free to spread indefinitely on an unlimited
surface, that is to say left only to the devices of its internal

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

affinities ? Something unimaginable, certainly something alto-
gether different from the modern world. Perhaps even nothing
at all, when we think of the extreme importance of the role
played in its development by the forces of compression.

Originally and for centuries there was no serious obstacle
to the human waves expanding over the surface of the globe ;
probably this is one of the reasons explaining the slowness of
their social evolution. Then, from the Neolithic age onwards,
these waves began, as we have seen, to recoil upon themselves.
All available space being occupied, the occupiers had to pack in
tighter. That is how, step by step, through the simple multiply-
ing effect of generations, we have come to constitute, as we do
at present, an almost solid mass of hominised substance.

Now, to the degree that — under the effect of this pressure
and thanks to their psychic permeability — the human elements
infiltrated more and more into each other, their minds (mysterious
coincidence) were mutually stimulated by proximity. And as
though dilated upon themselves, they each extended little by
little the radius of their influence upon this earth which, by the
same token, shrank steadily. What in fact do we see happening
in the modern paroxysm ? It has been stated over and over
again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the
motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man,
formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of
leagues or more. Better still : thanks to the prodigious biological
event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves,
each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively)
simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the
earth.

Thus, not only through the constant increase in the numbers
of its members, but also through the continual augmentation of
their area of individual activity, mankind — forced to develop
as it is in a confined area — has found itself relentlessly subjec-
ted to an intense pressure, a sclf-acccntuating pressure, because
each advance in it caused a corresponding expansion in each
element.

240

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

That is one of the first facts to keep in mind, or we shall
vitiate our picture of the future of the world.

Undeniably, quite apart from any hypothesis, the external
play of cosmic forces, when combined with the nature— so prone
to coalesce— of our thinking souls, operates towards a concen-
tration of the energies of consciousness ; and so powerful is
this effort that it even succeeds in subjugating the very con-
structions of phylogenesis— but wc shall be coming to that
presently.

b. Coalescence of the Branches. Twice already— once in developing
the theory and once in outlining the historic phases of anthro-
pogenesis— I called attention to the curious property, peculiar
to human lines of descent, of coming into contact and mixing with
each other, notably by means of their psychic sheath and social
institutions. The moment has now come to make a general
survey of the phenomenon and discover its ultimate significance.
What at first sight intrigues the naturalist when he tries to
ve the hominids— not merely in themselves, as anthropologists
usually do, but in comparison with other animal forms— is the
extraordinary elasticity of their zoological group. Outwardly
in man, the anatomical differentiation of a primitive type pursues
its course as everywhere in evolution. By genetic effects muta-
tions are produced. By climatic and geographical influences,
varieties and races come into existence. Somatically speaking,
the ' fanning-out ' is present continually in formation and per-
fecdy recognisable. Yet the remarkable thing is that its divergent
branches no longer succeed in separating. Under conditions of
distribution which in any other initial phylum would have led
long ago to the break up into different species, the human
verticil as it spreads out remains entire, like a gigantic leaf whose
veins, however distinct, remain always joined in a common
tissue. With man we find indefinite interfecundation on every
level, the blending of genes, anastomoses of races in civilisa-
tions or political bodies. Zoologically speaking, mankind
offers us the unique spectacle of a ' species ' capable of achiev-
ing something in which all previous species had failed It.

241

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

has succeeded, not only in becoming cosmopolitan, but in
stretching a single organised membrane over the earth without

breaking it. .

To what should we attribute this strange condition it not to
a reversal, or more exactly a radical pcrfcctioning, of the ways
of life by the operation (at last, and only now possible) of a
powerful instrument of evolution-the coalescence upon itself of

an entire phylum ? . .

Here again, at the base of the process, lies the exiguity of
the earth on which the living stems are forced by their very
growth to writhe and intertwine their living branches like
ferried shoots of ivy. But this external contact was and would
always have remained insufficient to reach a point of conjunction
without the new ' binder ' conferred on the human biota by the
birth of reflection. Until man came, the most life had managed
to realise in the matter of association had been to gather socially
together on themselves, one by one, the finer extremities of the
same phylum. This resulted in essentially mechanical and family
groups created on a purely ' functional ' impulse of construction,
defence or propagation, such as the colony, the hive or the
ant-heap— all organisms whose power of association is limited
to the offspring of one single mother. From man onwards,
thanks to the universal framework or support provided by
thought, free rein is given to the forces of confluence. At the
heart of this new milieu, the branches themselves of one and
the same group succeed in uniting, or rather they become welded
together even before they have managed to separate off.

In this way the differentiation of groups in the course of
human phylogenesis is maintained up to a certain point, that is
to say so far as— by gropingly creating new types— it is a biologi-
cal condition of discovery and enrichment. After that (or at the
same time)— as happens on a sphere where the meridians separate
off at one pole only to come together at the other— this divergence
gives place to, and becomes subordinate to, a movement of
convergence in which races, peoples and nations consolidate one
another and complete one another by mutual fecundation.

242

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

Anthropologically, ethnically, socially, morally, we under-
stand nothing about man and can make no valid forecasts of
his future, so long as we fail to see that, in his case, ' ramifi-
cation ' (in so far as it still persists) works only with the aim
— and under higher forms — of agglomeration and convergence.
Formation of verticils, selection, struggle for life — henceforward
these are secondary functions, subordinate in man to a task of
cohesion, a furling back upon itself of a ' bundle ' of potential
species around the surface of the earth, a completely new mode
of phylogenesis. 1

B. Mega-Synthesis

The coalescence of elements and the coalescence of stems, the
spherical geometry of the earth and psychical curvature of the
mind harmonising to counterbalance the individual and collective
forces of dispersion in the world and to impose unification — there
at last we find the spring and secret of hominisation.

But why should there be unification in the world and what
purpose does it serve ?

To sec the answer to this ultimate question, we have only
to put side by side the two equations which have been gradually
formulating themselves from the moment we began trying to
situate the phenomenon of man in the world.

Evolution= Rise of consciousness,

Rise of consciousness= Union effected.

The general gathering together in which, by correlated
actions of the without and the within of the earth, the totality of
thinking units and thinking forces are engaged — the aggregation
in a single block of a mankind whose fragments weld together
and interpenetrate before our eyes in spite of (indeed in pro-
portion to) their efforts to separate — all this becomes intelligible
from top to bottom as soon as we perceive it as the natural
culmination of a cosmic processus of organisation which has
1 This is what I have called elsewhere ' the human Planetisation '.

243

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

never varied since those remote ages when our planet was young.

First the molecules of carbon compounds with their thousands
of atoms symmetrically grouped ; next the cell which, within a
very small volume, contains thousands of molecules linked in a
complicated system ; then the metazoa in which the cell is no
more than an almost infinitesimal element ; and later the mani-
fold attempts made sporadically by the metazoa to enter into
symbiosis and raise themselves to a higher biological condi-
tion.

And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes
the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and inter-
twines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to
reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.

Really I can see no coherent, and therefore scientific, way
of grouping this immense succession of facts but as a gigantic
psycho-biological operation, a sort of mega-synthesis, the ' super-
arrangement ' to which all the thinking elements of the earth
find themselves today individually and collectively subject.

Mega-synthesis in the tangential, and therefore and thereby
a leap forward of the radial energies along the principal axis of
evolution : ever more complexity and thus ever more con-
sciousness. If that is what really happens, what more do we
need to convince ourselves of the vital error hidden in the depths
of any doctrine of isolation ? The egocentric ideal of a future
reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the
extremity of everyone for himself' is false and against nature.
No element could move and grow except with and by all the
others with itself.

Also false and against nature is the racial ideal of one branch
draining off for itself alone all the sap of the tree and rising
over the death of other branches. To reach the sun nothing less
is required than the combined growth of the entire foliage.

The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry
into the super-human — these are not thrown open to a few of
the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all
others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a

244

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

direction in which all together* can join and find completion in a
spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical
degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we
must make clearer.

2. THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH

A. Mankind

Mankind : the idea of mankind was the first image in terms
of which, at the very moment that he awoke to the idea of
progress, modern man must have tried to reconcile the hopes of
an unlimited future with which he could no longer dispense with
the perspective of the inevitability of his own unavoidable
individual death. ' Mankind ' was at first a vague entity, felt
rather than thought out, in which an obscure feeling of perpetual
growth was allied to a need for universal fraternity. Mankind was
the object of a faith that was often naive but whose magic, being
stronger than all vicissitudes and criticisms, goes on working with
persuasive force upon the present-day masses and on the 'intelli-
gentsia ' alike. Whether one takes part in the cult or makes
fun of it, even today no-one can escape being haunted or even
dominated by the idea of mankind.

In the eyes of the ' prophets ' of the eighteenth century, the
world appeared really as no more than a jumble of confused
and loose relationships ; and the divination of a believer was
required to feel the beating heart of that sort of embryo Now
less than two hundred years later, here we are penetrating
(though hardly conscious of the fact) into the reality, at any rate
the material reality, of what our fathers expected. In the course
of a few generations all sorts of economic and cultural links have
been forged around us and they are multiplying in geometric
progression. Nowadays, over and above the bread which to
simple Neolithic man symbolised food, each man demands his
1 Even if they do so only under the influence of a few, an ilite.

245

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

daily ration of iron, copper and cotton, of electricity, oil and
radium, of discoveries, of the cinema and of international news.
It is no longer a simple field, however big, but the whole earth
which is required to nourish each one of us. If words have any
meaning, is this not like some great body which is being born
—with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its
memory— the body in fact of that great Thing which had to
come to fulfil the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by
the newly acquired consciousness that he was at one with and
responsible to an evolutionary All ?

Indeed, following logically upon our effort to co-ordinate
and organise the lines of the world, it is to an outlook recalling
the initial intuition of the first philanthropists that our minds
constantly return, with the elimination of individualist and racial
heresies. No evolutionary future awaits man except in associa-
tion with all other men. The dreamers of yesterday glimpsed
that. And in a sense we see the same tiling. But what we are
better able to perceive, because we stand on their shoulders, are
its cosmic roots, its particular physical substance, and finally the
specific nature of this mankind of which they could only have
a presentiment— and which we cannot overlook unless we shut

our eyes.

Cosmic roots. For the earliest humanitarians, man, in uniting
with liis fellows, was following a natural precept whose origins
people hardly bothered to analyse and hence to measure their
gravity. In those days, was not nature still treated as a personage
or as a poetic metaphor ? What she required of us at a particular
time she might have just thought up yesterday and perhaps
would no longer want tomorrow. For us, more aware of the
dimensions and structural demands of the world, the forces
which converge upon us from without or arise from within
and drive us ever closer together, are losing any semblance of
arbitrariness and any danger of instability.

Mankind was a fragile and even fictitious construction so
long as it could only have a limited, plural and disjointed cosmos
as a setting ; but it becomes consistent and at the same time

246

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUB

probable as soon as it is brought within the compass of a biological
space-time and appears as a continuation of the very lines of the
universe amongst other realities as vast as itself.

Physical stuff. For many of our contemporaries, mankind
still remains something unreal, unless materialised in an absurd
way. For some it is only an abstract entity or even a mere
conventional expression ; for others it becomes a closely-knit
organic group in which the social element can be transcribed
literally in terms of anatomy and physiology. It appears either
as a general idea, a legal entity, or else as a gigantic animal. In
both views we find the same inability, by default or by excess,
to think the whole correctly. Does not the only way out of this
dead-end lie in introducing boldly into our intellectual frame-
work yet another category to serve for the super-individual ?
After all, why not ? Geometry, at first constructed on rational
conceptions of size, would have remained stationary if it had
not in the end accepted ' e ', tc, and other incommensurables
as being just as complete and intelligible as any whole number.
The calculus would never have resolved the problems posed by
modern physics if it had not constantly continued to conceive
new functions. For identical reasons biology would not be able
to generalise itself on the dimensions of the whole of life without
introducing into the scale of values that it now needs to deal
with certain stages of being which common experience has
hitherto been able to ignore — and in particular that of the collective.
Yes, from now on we envisage, beside and above individual
realities, the collective realities that arc not reducible to the com-
ponent clement, yet are in their own way as objective as it is.
Is it not in this way that I have been inescapably forced to write
so as to translate the movements of life into concepts ?

Phyla, layers, branches, etc. . . .

To the eye that has become adjusted to the perspectives of
evolution, the directed groups of phyla, layers, branches, etc.
become perforce as clear, as physically real, as any isolated
object. And in this particular class of dimensions mankind
naturally takes its place. But, for it to become reprcsentable to

247

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

us, it is enough that by a mental re-orientation we should reach
the point of seeing it directly, exactly as it is, widiout attempt-
ing to put it into terms of anything simpler which we know

^Specific nature. Here, lastly, we pickup the problem again
at the point at which the realisation of the confluence of human
thoughts had already led us. Being a collective reahty and
therefore sui generis, mankind can only be understood to the
extent that, leaving behind it. body of tangible constructions,
we try to determine the particular type of conscious synthesis
emerging from its laborious and industrious concentration. It
is in the last resort only definable as a mind.

Now from this point of view and in the present condition of
things, there are two ways, through two stages, in which we can
picture the form mankind will assume tomorrow-either (and
this is simpler) as a common power and act of knowing and doing,
or (and this goes much deeper) as an organic superaggregation
of souls. In short : science or unanimity.

b. Science

Taken in the full modern sense of the word, science is the twin
sister of mankind. Born together, the two ideas (or two dreams)
grew up together to attain an almost religious valuation in the
course of the last century. Subsequently they fell together into
the same disrepute. But that does not prevent them, when
mutually supporting one another as they do from continuing
to represent (in fact more than ever) the ideal forces upon winch
our imagination falls back whenever it seeks to materialise in
terrestrial form its reasons for believing and hoping.

The future of science ... As a first approximanon it is out-
lined on our horizon as the establishment of an overall and
completely coherent perspective of the universe There was a
time when the only part ascribed to knowledge lay in lighting
up for our speculative pleasure the objects ready made and given

24 8

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

around us. Nowadays, thanks to a philosophy which has given a
meaning and a consecration to our thirst to think all things, we
can glimpse that unconsciousness is a sort of ontological inferiority
or evil, since the world can only fulfil itself in so far as it expresses
itself in a systematic and reflective perception. Even (above all,
maybe) in mathematics, is not ' discovery ' the bringing into
existence of something new ? From this point of view, intellec-
tual discovery and synthesis are no longer merely speculation
but creation. Therefore, some physical consummation of things
is bound up with the explicit perception we make of them. And
therefore, they are (at least partially) right 1 who situate the crown
of evolution in a supreme act of collective vision obtained by a
pan-human effort of investigation and construction. 8

Knowledge for its own sake. But also, and perhaps still more,
knowledge for power.

Since its birth, science has made its greatest advances when
stimulated by some particular problem of life needing a solution ;
and its most sublime theories would always have drifted, rootless,
on the flood of human thought if they had not been promptly
incorporated into some way of mastering the world. Accordingly
the march of humanity, as a prolongation of that of all other
animate forms, develops indubitably in the direction of a con-
quest of matter put to the service of mind. Increased power for
increased action. But, finally and above all, increased action for
increased being.

Of old, the forerunners of our chemists strove to find the
philosophers' stone. Our ambition has grown since then. It is
no longer to make gold but life ; and in view of all that has
happened in the last fifty years, who would dare to say that this

1 Is not this one of Brunschvig's ideas ?

* One might say that, by virtue of human reflection (both individual and
collective), evolution, overflowing the physico-chemical organisation of
bodies, turns back upon itself and thereby reinforces itself (see note following)
■with a new organising power vastly concentric to the first — the cognitive
organisation of the universe. To think ' the world ' (as physics is beginning
to realise) is not merely to register it but to confer upon it a form of unity it
would otherwise (i.e. without being thought) be without.

249

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

is a mere mirage? With our knowledge of hormones we appear
to be on the eve of having a hand in the development of our
bodies and even of our brains. With the discovery of genes it
appears that we shall soon be able to control the mechanism of
organic heredity. And with the synthesis of albuminoids immi-
nent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the
earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce : a new
wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life. 1 Immense
and prolonged as the universal groping has been since the begin-
ning, many possible combinations have been able to slip through
die fingers of chance and have had to await man's calculated
efforts in order to appear. Thought might artificially perfect the
thinking instrument itself ; life might rebound forward under
the collective effect of its reflection. The dream upon which
human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of master-
ing, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate
energy of which all other energies are merely servants ; and thus,
by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller
of the world.

I salute those who have the courage to admit that their hopes
extend that far ; they are at the pinnacle of mankind ; and I
would say to them that there is less difference than people think
between research and adoration. But there is a point I would
like them to note, one that will lead us gradually to a more
complete form of conquest and adoration. However far science
pushes its discovery of the ' essential fire ' and however capable
it becomes some day of remodelling and perfecting the human
element, it will always find itself in the end facing the same
problem — how to give to each and every element its final value
by grouping them in the unity of an organised whole.

1 It is what I have called ' the human rebound ' of evolution as correlative and
conjugated with Planet isat ion.

250

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

c. Unanimity

sunder Tt the ,f rm mC &-^ h ™- Within a better under-

De Z 2 f ^ u"™' " SCemS t0 me that the word ^uld
be understood without attenuation or metaphors when applied

homo. SUni hUma " bemgS " The UIUVerse is Warily

homogeneous in .ts nature and dimensions. Would it still be

rLlitv n PS SFral l0St ° nC j0t ° r titde of ^ir dc g'ee of

uTaL^Tl ° nS1St T C l 'I aSCendmg CVer hi 8 her ? T& "ill
unnamed Thing wbch the gradual combination of individuals,
peoples and races will bring into existence, must needs be
sup'a-phystcal, not infra-physical, if it is to be coherent with the
rest. Deeper than the common act in which it expresses itself
more important than the common power of action from which

by the living reunion of reflective particles

ibleWlt^ ^ t^" 1011111 t0 l[nQt < and ]t » q«tc cred-
ible) that the stuff of the universe, by becoming thinking has

not yet completed its evolutionary cycle, and that we are rWo£

moving forward towards some new critical point that hes ahead

In spite of its organic links, whose existence has everwhere'

become apparent to us, the biosphere has so far been no more

than a network of divergent line. f rec at their extremities. By

effect of reflection and the recoils it involves, the loose ends

have been tied up, and the noosphere tends to constitute a

single closed system „, which each element sees, feels, desires

^suffers for itself the same things as all the others at the same

We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of conscious-
nesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is
that of the earth not only becoming covered by mynads of
grains of thought but becoming enclosed in a single thinking
envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast
grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual

251

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one
another in the act of a single unanimous reflection.

This is the general form in which, by analogy and in sym-
metry with the past, we are led scientifically to envisage the
future of mankind, without whom no terrestrial issue is open
to the terrestrial demands of our action.

To the common sense of the ' man in the street ' and even
to a certain philosophy of the world to which nothing is possible
save what has always been, perspectives such as these will seem
highly improbable. But to a mind become familiar with the
fantastic dimensions of the universe they will, on the contrary,
seem quite natural, because they are simply proportionate with
the astronomical immensities.

In the direction of thought, could the universe terminate
with anything less than the measureless — any more than it could
in the direction of time and space ?

One thing at any rate is sure — from the moment we adopt
a thoroughly realistic view of the noosphere and of the hyper-
organic nature of social bonds, the present situation of the world
becomes clearer ; for we find a very simple meaning for the
profound troubles which disturb the layer of mankind at this
moment.

The two-fold crisis whose onset began in earnest as early as
the Neolithic age and which rose to a climax in the modern
world, derives in the first place from a mass-formation (we might
call it a ' planetisation ') of mankind. Peoples and civilisations
reached such a degree either of frontier contact or economic
interdependence or psychic communion that they could no
longer develop save by interpenetration of one another. But it
also arises out of the fact that, under the combined influence of
machinery and the super-heating of thought, we are witnessing
a formidable upsurge of unused powers. Modern man no longer
knows what to do with the time and the potentialities he has
unleashed. We groan under the burden of this wealth. We
are haunted by the fear of ' unemployment '. Sometimes we
are tempted to trample this super-abundance back into the

252

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

matter from which it sprang without stopping to think how
impossible and monstrous such an act against nature would be.

When we consider the increasing compression of elements
at the heart of a free energy which is also relentlessly increasing,
how can we fail to see in this two-fold phenomenon the two
perennial symptoms of a leap forward of the * radial '—that is
to say, of a new step in the genesis of mind ?

In order to avoid disturbing our habits we seek in vain to
settle international disputes by adjustments of frontiers— or we
treat as ' leisure ' (to be whiled away) the activities at the disposal
of mankind. As things are now going it will not be long before
we run full tilt into one another. Something will explode if
we persist in trying to squeeze into our old tumble-down huts
the material and spiritual forces that are henceforward on the
scale of a world.

A new domain of psychical expansion— that is what we lack.
And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to
look at it.

Peace through conquest, work in joy. These are waiting for
us beyond the line where empires are set up against other empires,
in an interior totalisation of the world upon itself, in the unani-
mous construction of a spirit of the earth.

How is it then that our first efforts towards this great goal
seem merely to take us farther from it ?

253

CHAPTER TWO

BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE:
THE HYPER-PERSONAL

Another Preliminary Observation
A Feeling to be overcome : Discouragement

The reasons behind the scepticism regarding mankind which is
fashionable among ' enlightened ' people today are not merely
of a representative order. Even when the intellectual difficulties
of the mind in conceiving the collective and visualising space-
time have been overcome, we are left with another and perhaps
a still more serious form of hesitation which is bound up with
the incoherent aspect presented by the world of men today.
The nineteenth century had lived in sight of a promised land.
It thought that we were on the threshold of a Golden Age,
lit up and organised by science, warmed by fraternity. Instead
of that, we find ourselves slipped back into a world of spreading
and ever more tragic dissension. Though possible and even
perhaps probable in theory, the idea of a spirit of the earth
does not stand up to the test of experience. No, man will never
succeed in going beyond man by uniting with himself. That
Utopia must be abandoned as soon as possible and there is no
more to be said.

To explain or efface the appearances of a setback which, if
it were true, would not only dispel a beautiful dream but encour-
age us to weigh up a radical absurdity of the universe, I would
like to point out in the first place that to speak of experience—
of the results of experience— in such a connection is premature

254

BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL

to say the least of it. After alJ half a million years, perhaps even
a million, were required for life to pass from the pre-hominids
to modern man. Should we now start wringing our hands
because, less than two centuries after glimpsing a higher state,
modern man is still at loggerheads with himself ? Once again
we have got things out of focus. To have understood the
immensity around us, behind us, and in front of us is already
a first step. But if to this perception of depth another perception,
that of sloivness, be not added, we must realise that the trans-
position of values remains incomplete and that it can beget for
our gaze nothing but an impossible world. Each dimension
has its proper rhythm. Planetary movement involves planetary
majesty. Would not humanity seem to us altogether static if,
behind its history, there were not the endless stretch of its pre-
history ? Similarly, and despite an almost explosive acceleration
of noogenesis at our level, we cannot expect to see the earth
transform itself under our eyes in the space of a generation.
Let us keep calm and take heart.

In spite of all evidence to the contrary, mankind may very
well be advancing all round us at the moment — there are in
fact many signs whereby we can reasonably suppose that it is
advancing. But, if it is doing so, it must be — as is the way with
very big tilings — doing so almost imperceptibly.

This point is of the utmost importance and must never be
lost sight of. To have made it does not, however, allay the most
acute of our fears. After all we need not mind very much if
the light on the horizon appears stationary. What does matter
is when it seems to be going out. If only we could believe that
we were merely motionless ! But does it not sometimes seem
that we are actually being blocked in our advance or even
swallowed up from behind — as though we were in the grip of
some ineluctable forces of mutual repulsion and materialisation.
Repulsion. I have spoken of the formidable pressures which
hem in the human particles in the present-day world, both
individuals and peoples being forced in an extreme way, geo-
graphically and psychologically, up against one another. Now

25S

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

the strange fact is that, in spite of the strength of these energies
bringing men together, thinking units do not seem capable of
falling within their radius of internal attraction. Leaving aside
individual cases, where sexual forces or some extraordinary and
transitory common passion come into play, men are hostile or
at least closed to one another. Like a powder whose particles,
however compressed, refuse to enter into molecular contact,
deep down men exclude and repel one another with all their
might : unless (and this is worse still) their mass forms in such
a way that, instead of the expected mind, a new wave of deter-
minism surges up — that is to say, of materiality.
Materialisation. Here I am not only thinking of the laws of
large numbers which, irrespective of their secret ends, enslave
by structure each newly-formed multitude. As with every other
form of life, man, to become fully man, had to become legion.
And, before becoming organised, a legion is necessarily prey to
the play, however directed it be, of chance and probability. There
are imponderable currents which, from fashion and rates of
exchange to political and social revolutions, make us all the
slaves of the obscure seethings of the human mass. However
spiritualised we suppose its elements to be, every aggregate of
consciousness, so long as it is not harmonised, envelops itself
automatically (at its own level) with a veil of ' neo-matter ',
superimposed upon all other forms of matter — matter, the
' tangential ' aspect of every living mass in course of unification.
Of course we must react to such conditions ; but with the
satisfaction of knowing that they are only the sign of and price
paid for progress. But what are we to say of the other slavery,
the one which gains ground in the world in very proportion to
the efforts we make to organise ourselves ?

At no previous peripd of history has mankind been so well
equipped nor made such efforts to reduce its multitudes to order.
We have ' mass movements ' — no longer the hordes streaming
down from the forests of the north or the steppes of Asia, but
' the Million ' scientifically assembled. The Million in rank and
file on the parade ground ; the Million standardised in the

2j6

BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL

factory ; the Million motorised— and all this enly ending up
with Communism and National-Socialism and the most ghastly
fetters. So we get the crystal instead of the cell ; the ant-hill
instead of brotherhood. Instead of the upsurge of consciousness
which we expected, it is mechanisation that seems to emerge
inevitably from totalisation.

'Eppur si muove ! '

In the presence of such a profound perversion of the rules
of noogenesis, I hold that our reaction should be not one of
despair but of a determination to re-examine ourselves. When
an energy runs amok, the engineer, far from questioning the
power itself, simply works out his calculations afresh to see how
it can be brought better under control. Monstrous as it is, is
not modern totalitarianism really the distortion of something
magnificent, and thus quite near to the truth ? There can be no
doubt of it : the great human machine is designed to work and
must work— by producing a super-abundance of mind. If it does
not work, or rather if it produces only matter, this means that
it has gone into reverse.

Is it not possible that in our theories and in our acts we have
neglected to give due place to the person and the forces of
personalisation ?

i. THE CONVERGENCE OF THE PERSON
AND THE OMEGA POINT

A. The Personal Universe

Unlike the primitives who gave a face to every moving thing, or
the early Greeks who defined all the aspects and forces of nature,
modern man is obsessed by the need to depersonalise (or im-
personalise) all that he most admires. There are two reasons
for this tendency, The first is analysis, that marvellous instru-
ment of scientific research to which we owe all our advances
but which, breaking down synthesis after synthesis, allows on

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

soul after another to escape, leaving us confronted with a pile of
dismantled machinery, and evanescent particles. The second
reason lies in the discovery of the sidereal world, so vast that ,t
seems to do away with all proportion between our own being
and the dimensions of the cosmos around us. Only one reality
seems to survive and be capable of succeeding and spanning the
infinitesimal and the immense: energy-that floating universal
entity from which all emerges and into which all falls back as
into an ocean ; energy, the new spirit ; the new god. So, at the
world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal

Under the influence of such impressions as these, it looks
as though we have lost both respect for the person and under-
standing of his true nature. We end up by admitting that to
be pivoted on oneself, to be able to say ' I', is the privilege (or
rather the blemish) of the element in the measure to which the
latter closes the door on all the rest and succeeds in setting him-
self up at the antipodes of the All. In the opposite direction we
conceive the ' ego ' to be diminishing and eliminating itself,
with the trend to what is most real and most lasting m the
world namely the Collective and the Universal. Personality is
seen as a specifically corpuscular and ephemeral property ; a
prison from which we must try to escape.

Intellectually, that is more or less where we stand today.
Yet if we try, as I have done in this essay, to pursue the
Wic and coherence of facts to the very end, we seem to be
led to the precisely opposite view by the notions of space-time

and evolution.

We have seen and admitted that evolution is an ascent
towards consciousness. That is no longer contested even by the
most materialistic, or at all events by the most agnostic of
humanitarians. Therefore it should culminate forwards in some
sort of supreme consciousness. But must not that consciousness,
if it is to be supreme, contain in the highest degree what is the
perfection of our consciousness-thc illuminating involution ot
the being upon itself ? It would manifestly be an error to extend
the curve of hominisation in the direction of a state of diffusion.

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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL

It is only in the direction of hyper-reflection — that is to say,
hyper-pcrsonalisation— that thought can extrapolate itself.
Otherwise how could it garner our conquests which are all made
in the field of what is reflected ? At first sight we arc disconcerted
by the association of an Ego with what is the All. The utter
disproportion of the two terms seems flagrant, almost laughable.
That is because we have not sufficiently meditated upon the
three-fold property possessed by every consciousness : (i) of
centring everything partially upon itself ; (ii) of being able to
centre itself upon itself constantly ; and (iii) of being brought more
by this very super-centration into association with all the other
centres surrounding it. Are we not at every instant living the
experience of a universe whose immensity, by the play of our
senses and our reason, is gathered up more and more simply in
each one of us ? And in the establishment now proceeding
through science and the philosophies of a collective human
Weltanschauung in which every one of us co-operates and
participates, are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an
aggregation of a still higher order, the birth of some single
centre from die convergent beams of millions of elementary
centres dispersed over the surface of the thinking earth ?

All our difficulties and repulsions as regards the opposition
between the All and the Person would be dissipated if only we
understood that, by structure, the noosphere (and more generally
the world) represent a whole that is not only closed but also
centred. Because it contains and engenders consciousness, space-
time is necessarily oja convergent nature. Accordingly its enormous
layers, followed in die right direction, must somewhere ahead
become involuted to a point which we might call Omega, which
fuses and consumes them integrally in itself. However immense
the sphere of the world may be, it only exists and is finally
perceptible in the directions in which its radii meet — even if
this were beyond time and space altogether. Better still : the
more immense this sphere, the richer and deeper and hence the
more conscious is the point at which the ' volume of being '
that it embraces is concentrated ; because the mind, seen from

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

our side, is essentially the power of synthesis and organisation.

Seen from this point of view, the universe, without losing
any of its immensity and thus without suffering any anthro-
pomorphism, begins to take shape : since to think it, undergo it
and make it act, it is beyond our souls that we must look, not the
othe, way round. In the perspective of a noogenesis, time and
space become truly humanised^r rather super-humanised. Far
from being mutually exclusive, the Universal and Personal
(that is to say, the ' centred ') grow in the same direction and
culminate simultaneously in each other.

It is therefore a mistake to look for the extension ot our
being or of the noosphere in the Impersonal. The Future-
Universal could not be anything else but the Hyper-Personal-
at the Omega Point.

b. The Personalising Universe

Personalisation. It is by this internal deepening of consciousness
upon itself that we have characterised (Book III, Chapter I,
Section I) the particular destiny of the element that has become
fully itself by crossing the threshold of reflection— and there,
a regards the fate of individual human beings-we brought our
inquiry to a provisional halt. Personalisation : the same type
of progress reappears here, but this time it defines the collective
future of totalised grains of thought. There is an identical
function for the element as for the sum of the elements brought
together in a synthesis. How can we conceive and foresee that
the two movements harmonise ? How, without being impeded
or deformed, can the innumerable particular curves be inscribed
or even prolonged in their common envelope ?

The time has come to tackle this problem, and, for that pur-
pose to analyse still further the nature of the personal centre of
convergence upon whose existence hangs the evolutionary
equilibrium of the noosphere. What should this higher pole of
evolution be, in order to fulfil its role ?

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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PESSON AL

It is by definition in Omega that — in its flower and its integrity
— the hoard of consciouness liberated little by little on earth
by noogenesis adds itself together and concentrates. So much
has already been accepted. But what exactly do we mean, what
is implied, when we use the apparently simple phrase 'addition
of consciousness ' ?

When we listen to the disciples of Marx, we might think
it was enough for mankind (for its growth and to justify the
sacrifices imposed on us) to gather together the successive
acquisitions we bequeath to it in dying — our ideas, our dis-
coveries, our works of art, our example. Surely this imperish-
able treasure is the best part of our being.

Let us reflect a moment, and we shall soon see that for a
universe which, by hypothesis, we admitted to be a ' collector
and custodian of consciousness ', the mere hoarding of these
remains would be nothing but a colossal wastage. What passes
from each of us into the mass of humanity by means of invention,
education and diffusion of all sorts is admittedly of vital impor-
tance. I have sufficiently tried to stress, its phylctic value and no
one can accuse me of belittling it. But with that accepted, I am
bound to admit that, in these contributions to the collectivity,
far from transmitting the most precious, we are bequeathing, at
the utmost, only the shadow of ourselves. Our works ? But
even in the interest of life in general, what is the work of works
for man if not to establish, in and by each one of us, an absolutely
original centre in which the universe reflects itself in a unique
and inimitable way ? And those centres are our very selves and
personalities. The very centre of our consciousness, deeper than
all its radii ; that is the essence which Omega, if it is to be truly
Omega, must reclaim. And this essence is obviously not some-
thing of which we can dispossess ourselves for the benefit of
others as we might give away a coat or pass on a torch. For we
are the very flame of that torch. To communicate itself, my ego
must subsist through abandoning itself or the gift will fade away.
The conclusion is inevitable that the concentration of a conscious
universe would be unthinkable if it did not reassemble in itself

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

all consciousnesses as well as all the conscious; each particular
consaousness remaining conscious of itself at the end of the opera-
tion and even (this must absolutely be understood) each part cul r
consaousness becoming sail more itself and thus more clearly
distinct from others the closer it gets to them in Omega.

The exaltation, not merely the conservation, of elements by
convergence : what, after all, could be more simple, and more
thoroughly in keeping with all we know ?

In any domain-whetber it be the cells of a body the mem-
bers of a society or the elements of a spiritual synthesis-««.o»
differentiates. In every organised whole, the parts perfect them-
selves and fulfil themselves. Through neglect of this universal
rule many a system of pantheism has led us astray to the cult
of a great All in which individuals were supposed to be merged
like a drop in the ocean or like a dissolving grain of salt. Applied
to the case of the summation of consciousnesses, the law of union
rids us of this perilous and recurrent illusion. No, following the
confluent orbits of their centres, the grains of consaousness do
not tend to lose their outlines and blend, but on the contrary,
to accentuate the depth and incommunicabilitv of their egos.
The more ' other ' they become in conjunction, the more they
find themselves as ' self. How could it be otherwise since they
are steeped in Omega? Could a centre dissolve? Or r«h£
would not its particular way of dissolving be to supercentrahse

^'Thus under the influence of these two factors-the essential
immiscibikty of consciousnesses, and the natural mechanism of
all unification-the only fashion in which we could correctly
express the final state of a world undergoing psychical con-
centration would be as a system whose unity coincides with a
paroxysm of harmonised complexity. Thus it would be mistaken
to represent Omega to ourselves simply as a centre born of the
fusion of elements which it collects, or annihilating them in
itself By its structure Omega, in its ultimate principle, can only
be a distinct Centre radiating at the core of a system of centres ; a
grouping in which personalisation of the All and personahsanons

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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL

of the elements reach their maximum, simultaneously and with-
out merging, under the influence of a supremely autonomous
focus of union. 1 That is the only picture which emerges when we
try to apply the notion of collectivity with remorseless logic to
a granular whole of thoughts.

And at this point we begin to see the motives for the fervour
and the impotence which accompany every egoistic solution of
life. Egoism, whether personal or racial, is quite rightly excited
by the idea of the element ascending through faithfulness to life,
to the extremes of the incommunicable and the exclusive that it
holds within it. It feels right. Its only mistake, but a fatal one,
is to confuse individuality with personality. In trying to separate
itself as much as possible from others, the element individualises
itself ; but in doing so it becomes retrograde and seeks to drag
the world backwards towards plurality and into matter. In fact
it diminishes itself and loses itself. To be fully ourselves it is in
the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all
the rest, that we must advance — towards the ' other '. The peak
of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality
but our person ; and according to the evolutionary structure of
the world, wc can only find our person by uniting together.
There is no mind without synthesis. The same law holds good
from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion
to ' egoism '. Like the Omega which attracts it, the element
only becomes personal when it universaliscs itself. 2

There is, however, an obvious and essential proviso to be
made. For the human particles to become really personalised
under the creative influence of union — according to the preceding
analysis — not every kind of union will do. Since it is a question of
achieving a synthesis of centres, it is centre to centre that they

1 It is for this central focus, necessarily autonomous, that we shall hence-
forward reserve the expression ' Omega Point '.

* Conversely, it only universalises itself properly in becoming super-per-
sonal. There is all the difference (and ambiguity) between the true and the
false political or religious mysticisms. By the latter man is destroyed ; by
the former he is fulfilled by ' becoming lost in the greater than himself'.

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

must make contact and not otherwise. Thus, amongst the various
forms of psychic inter-activity animating the noosphcre, the
energies we must identify, harness and develop before all others
are those of an ' intercentric ' nature, if we want to give effective
help to the progress of evolution in ourselves.
Which brings us to the problem of love.

2.

LOVE AS ENERGY

We are accustomed to consider (and with what a refinement of
analysis!) only the sentimental face of love, the joy and miseries
it causes us. It is in its natural dynamism and its evolutionary
significance that I shall be dealing with it here, with a view to
determining the ultimate phases of the phenomenon of man.

Considered in its full biological reality, love— that is to say,
the affinity of being with being— is not peculiar to man. It is
a general property of all life and as such it embraces, in its varieties
and degrees, all the forms successively adopted by organised
matter. In the mammals, so close to ourselves, it is easily recog-
nised in its different modalities : sexual passion, parental instinct,
social solidarity, etc. Farther off, that is to say lower down on
the tree of life, analogies are more obscure until they become so
faint as to be imperceptible. But this is the place to repeat what
I said earlier when we were discussing the ' within of things .
If there were no real internal propensity to unite, even at a pro-
digiously rudimentary level— indeed in the molecule itself— it
would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up,
with us, in ' hominised ' form. By rights, to be certain of its
presence in ourselves, we should assume its presence, at least in
an inchoate form, in everything that is. And in fact if we look
around us at the confluent ascent of consciousnesses, we see it
is not lacking anywhere. Plato felt this and has immortalised
the idea in his Dialogues. Later, with thinkers like Nicolas of
Cusa, mediaeval philosphy returned technically to the same
notion. Driven by ths forces of love, the fragments of the world

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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL

seek each other so that the world may come to being. This is
no metaphor ; and it is much more than poetry. Whether as a
force or a curvature, the universal gravity of bodies, so striking
to us, is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves
nature. To perceive cosmic energy ' at the fount ' we must, if
there is a within of things, go down into the internal or radial
zone of spiritual attractions.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than
the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element
by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

This, if I am not mistaken is the ray of light which will help
us to see more clearly around us.

We are distressed and pained when we see modern attempts
at human collectivisation ending up, contrary to our expectations
and theoretical predictions, in a lowering and an enslavement of
consciousnesses. But so far how have wc gone about the business
of unification ? A material situation to be defended ; a new
industrial field to be opened up, better conditions for a social
class or less favoured nations — those arc the only and very
mediocre grounds on which we have so far tried to get together.
There is no cause to be surprised if, in the footsteps of animal
societies, we become mechanised in the very play of association.
Even in the supremely intellectual activity of science (at any rate as
long as it remains purely speculative and abstract) the impact
of our souls only operates obliquely and indirectly. Contact is
still superficial, involving the danger of yet another servitude.
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as
to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins
them by what is deepest in themselves. This is a fact of daily
experience. At what moment do lovers come into the most
complete possession of themselves if not when they say they
are lost in each other ? In truth, does not love every instant achieve
all around us, in the couple or the team, the magic feat, the feat
reputed to be contradictory, of ' personalising ' by totalising ?
And if that is what it can achieve daily on a small scale, why
should it not repeat this one day on world-wide dimensions ?

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals
and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the clement with
the whole, and of unity with multitude— all these are called
Utopian and yet they are biologically necessary. And for them
to be incarnated in the world all we may well need is to imagine
our power of loving developing until it embraces the total of
men and of the earth.

It may be said that this is the precise point at which we are
invoking the impossible. Man's capacity, it may seem, is con-
fined to giving his affection to one human being or to very few.
Beyond that radius the heart does not carry, and there is only
room for cold justice and cold reason. To love all and everyone
is a contradictory and false gesture which only leads in the end to

loving no-one.

To that I would answer that if, as you claim, a universal love
is impossible, how can we account for that irresistible instinct
in our hearts which leads us towards unity whenever and in
whatever direction our passions are stirred ? A sense of the uni-
verse, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when con-
fronted by nature, beauty, music— these seem to be an expectation
and awareness of a Great Presence. The ' mystics ' and their
commentators apart, how has psychology been able so con-
sistently to ignore this fundamental vibration whose ring can
be heard by every practised ear at die basis, or rather at the
summit, of every great emotion ? Resonance to the All— the
keynote of pure poetry and pure religion. Once again : what
does this phenomenon, which is bom with thought and grows
with it, reveal if not a deep accord between two realities which
seek each other ; the severed particle which trembles at the
approach of ' the rest ' ?

We are often inclined to think that we have exhausted the
various natural forms of love with a man's love for his wife,
his children, his friends and to a certain extent for his country.
Yet precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing
from this list, the one which, under the pressure of an involuting
universe, precipitates the elements one upon the other in the

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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL

Whole — cosmic affinity and hence cosmic sense. A universal
love is not only psychologically possible ; it is the only complete
and final way in which we are able to love.

But, with this point made, how are we to explain the
appearance all around us of mounting repulsion and hatred ?
If such a strong potentiality is besieging us from within and
urging us to union, what is it waiting for to pass from potentiality
to action ? Just this, no doubt : that we should overcome the
' anti-personalist ' complex which paralyses us, and make up our
minds to accept the possibility, indeed the reality, of some
source of love and object of love at the summit of the world above
our heads. So long as it absorbs or appears to absorb the person,
collectivity kills the love that is trying to come to birth. As
such collectivity is essentially unlovable. That is where philan-
thropic systems break down. Common sense is right. It is
impossible to give oneself to an anonymous number. But if the
universe ahead of us assumes a face and a heart, and so to speak
personifies itself, 1 then in the atmosphere created by this focus
the elemental attraction will immediately blossom. Then, no
doubt, under the heightened pressure of an infolding world, the
formidable energies of attraction, still dormant between human
molecules, will burst forth.

The discoveries of the last hundred years, with their unitary
perspectives, have brought a new and decisive impetus to our
sense of the world, to our sense of the earth, and to our human
sense. Hence the rise of modern pantheism. But this impetus
will only end by plunging us back into super-matter unless it
leads us towards someone.

For die failure that threatens us to be turned into success,
for the concurrence of human monads to come about, it is
necessary and sufficient for us that we should extend our science
to its farthest limits and recognise and accept (as being necessary
to close and balance space-time) not only some vague future

1 Nor, of course, by becoming a person, but by charging itself at the very
heart of its development with the dominating and unifying influence of a
focus of personal energies and attractions.

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

existence, but also, as I must now stress, the radiation as a present
reality of that mysterious centre of our centres which I have
called Omega.

3. THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE
OMEGA POINT

After allowing itself to be captivated in excess by the charms of
analysis to the extent of falling into illusion, modern thought
is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative
value of synthesis in evolution. It is beginning to see that there
is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the
cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual,
and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and
theorems. We are now inclined to admit that at each further
degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated
elements emerges in a new order. And with this admission,
consciousness, life and thought are on the threshold of acquiring
a right to existence in terms of science. But science is nevertheless
still far from recognising that this something has a particular value
of independence and solidity. For, bom of an incredible con-
course of chances on a precariously assembled edifice, and failing
to create any measurable increase of energy by their advent, are
not these ' creatures of synthesis ', from the experimental point
of view, the most beautiful as well as the most fragile of things ?
How could they anticipate or survive the ephemeral union of
particles on which their souls have alighted ? So in the end, in
spite of a half-hearted conversion to spiritual views, it is still on
the elementary side— that is, towards matter infinitely diluted
—that physics and biology look to find the eternal and the Great

Stability.

In conformity with this state of mind the idea that some
Soul of souls should be developing at the summit of the world
is not as strange as might be thought from the present-day views
of human reason. After all, is there any other way in which our

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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL

thought can generalise the Principle of Emergence ? 1 At the
same time, as this Soul coincides with a supremely improbable
coincidence of the totality of elements and causes, it remains
understood or implied that it could not form itself save at an
extremely distant future and in a total dependence on the rever-
sible laws of energy.

Yet it is precisely from these two restrictions (fragility and
distance), both incompatible to my mind with the nature and
function of Omega, that we want to rid ourselves — and this for
two positive reasons, one of love, the other of survival.

First of all the reason of Love. Expressed in terms of internal
energy, the cosmic function of Omega consists in initiating and
maintaining within its radius the unanimity of the world's
' reflective ' particles. But how could it exercise this action
were it not in some sort loving and lovable at this very moment ?
Love, I said, dies in contact with the impersonal and the
anonymous. With equal infallibility it becomes impoverished
with remoteness in space — and still more, much more, with
difference in time. For love to be possible there must be co-
existence. Accordingly, however marvellous its foreseen figure,
Omega could never even so much as equilibrate the play of
human attractions and repulsions if it did not act with equal
force, that is to say with the same stuff of proximity. With
love, as with every other sort of energy, it is within the existing
datum that the lines of force must at every instant come together.
Neither an ideal centre, nor a potential centre could possibly
suffice. A present and real noosphere goes with a real and
present centre. To be supremely attractive, Omega must be
supremely present.

In addition, the reason of survival. To ward off the threat of
disappearance, incompatible with the mechanism of reflective
activity, man tries to bring together in an ever vaster and more
permanent subject the collective principle of his acquisitions —
civilisation, humanity, the spirit of the earth. Associated in these
enormous entities, with their incredibly slow rhythm of evolu-
1 See, the quotation 60m J. B. S. Haldane in footnote p. 57.

269

THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

tion, he has the impression of having escaped from the destructive
action of time. 1

But by doing this he has only pushed back the problem. For
after all, however large the radius traced witliin time and space,
does the circle ever embrace anything but the perishable ? So
long as our constructions rest with all their weight on the earth,
they will vanish with the earth. The radical defect in all forms
of belief in progress, as they are expressed in positivist credos,
is that they do not definitely eliminate death. What is the use of
detecting a focus of any sort in the van of evolution if that
focus can and must one day disintegrate ? To satisfy the ultimate
requirements of our action, Omega must be independent of the
collapse of the forces with which evolution is woven.

Actuality, irreversibility. There is only one way in which
our minds can integrate into a coherent picture of noogenesis
these two essential properties of the autonomous centre of all
centres, and that is to resume and complement our Principle of
Emergence. In the light of our experience it is abundantly
clear that emergence in the course of evolution can only happen
successively and with mechanical dependence on what precedes
it. First the grouping of the elements ; then the manifestation
of ' soul ' whose operation only betrays, from the point of view
of energy, a more and more complex and sublimated involution
of the powers transmitted by the chains of elements. The radial
function of the tangential : a pyramid whose apex is supported
from below : that is what we see during the course of the pro-
cess. And it is in the very same way that Omega itself is discovered
to us at the end of the whole processus, inasmuch as in it the
movement of synthesis culminates. Yet we must be careful to
note that under this evolutive facet Omega still only reveals
half of itself. While being the last term of its series, it is also
outside all series. Not only does it crown, but it closes. Otherwise
the sum would fall short of itself, in organic contradiction with
the whole operation. When, going beyond the elements, we

1 See for example that curious book by Wells, The Anatomy oj Frustration,
which eloquently bears witness to the faith and the misgivings ot modem man.

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BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE: THE HYPER-PERSONAL

come to speak of the conscious Pole of the world, it is not
enough to say that it emerges from the rise of consciousnesses:
we must add that from this genesis it has already emerged ;
without which it could neither subjugate into love nor fix in
incorruptibility. If by its very nature it did not escape from the
time and space which it gathers together, it would not be Omega.

Autonomy, actuality, irreversibility, and thus finally tran-
scendence are the four attributes of Omega. In this way we
round off without difficulty the scheme left incomplete at the
end of our second chapter, where we sought to enclose the
energy-complex of our universe.

In Omega we have in the first place the principle we needed
to explain both the persistent march of dungs towards greater
consciousness, and the paradoxical solidity of what is most
fragile. Contrary to the appearances still admitted by physics,
the Great Stability is not at the bottom in the infra-elementary
sphere, but at the top in the ultra-synthetic sphere. It is thus
entirely by its tangential envelope that the world goes on dissi-
pating itself in a chance way into matter. By its radial nucleus
it finds its shape and its natural consistency in gravitating against
the tide of probability towards a divine focus of mind which
draws it onward.

Thus something in the cosmos escapes from entropy, and
does so more and more.

During immense periods in the course of evolution, the radial,
obscurely stirred up by the action of the Prime Mover ahead,
was only able to express itself, in diffuse aggregates, in animal
consciousness. And at that stage, not being able, above them,
to attach themselves to a support whose order of simplicity was
greater than their own, the nuclei were hardly formed before
they began to disaggregate. But as soon as, through reflection,
a type of unity appeared no longer closed or even centred, but
punctiform, the sublime physics of centres came into play. When
they became centres, and therefore persons, the elements could
at last begin to react, direcdy as such, to the personalising action
of the centre of centres. When consciousness broke through the

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

critical surface of hominisation, it really passed from divergence
to convergence and changed, so to speak, both hemisphere and
pole. Below that critical ' equator ' lay the relapse into
multiplicity ; above it, the plunge into growing and irreversible
unification. Once formed, a reflective centre can no longer
change except by involution upon itself. To outward appearance,
admittedly, man disintegrated just like any animal. But here and
there we find an inverse function of the phenomenon. By death,
in the animal, the radial is reabsorbed into the tangential, while
in man it escapes and is liberated from it. It escapes from entropy
by turning back to Omega : the hominisation of death itself.

Thus from the grains of thought forming the veritable and
indestructable atoms of its stuff, the universe— a well-defined
universe in the outcome— goes on building itself above our
heads in the inverse direction of matter which vanishes. The
universe is a collector and conservator, not of mechanical energy,
as we supposed, but of persons. All round us, one by one, like
a continual exhalation, ' souls ' break away, carrying upwards
their incommunicable load of consciousness. One by one, yet
not in isolation. Since, for each of them, by the very nature of
Omega, there can only be one possible point of definitive
emersion — that point at which, under the synthesising action of
personalising union, the noosphere (furling its elements upon
themselves as it too furls upon itself) will reach collectively its
point of convergence — at the ' end of the world '.

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CHAPTER THREE

THE ULTIMATE EARTH

We have seen that without the involution of matter upon itself,
that is to say, without the closed chemistry of molecules, cells
and phyletic branches, there would never have been either
biosphere or noosphere. In their advent and their development,
life and thought are not only accidentally, but also structurally,
bound up with the contours and destiny of the terrestrial mass.

But, on the other hand, we now see ahead of us a psychical
centre of universal drift, transcending time and space and thus
essentially extra-planetary, to sustain and equilibrate the surge
of consciousnesses.

The idea is that of noogenesis ascending irreversibly towards
Omega through the strictly limited cycle of a gcogenesis. At a
given moment in the future, under some influence exerted by
one or the other of these curves or of both together, it is inevitable
that the two branches should separate. However convergent it
be, evolution cannot attain to fulfilment on earth except through
a point of dissociation.

With this we are introduced to a fantastic and inevitable
event which now begins to take shape in our perspective, the
event which comes nearer with every day that passes : the end
of all life on our globe, the death of the planet, the ultimate
phase of the phenomenon of man.

No one would dare to picture to himself what the noosphere
will be like in its final guise, no one, that is, who has glimpsed
however faindy the incredible potential of unexpectedness
accumulated in the spirit of the earth. The end of the world
defies imagination. But if it would be absurd to try to describe

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

it, we may none the less— by making use of the lines of approach
already laid down— to some extent foresee the significance and
circumscribe the forms.

What the ultimate earth cannot be in a universe of conscious
substance; how will it take shape; and what it will probably be
—those are the questions I want to raise, coldly and logically, in
no way apocalyptically, not so much for the sake of affirming
anything as to give food for thought.

i.

PROGNOSTICS TO BE SET ASIDE

When the end of the world is mentioned, the idea that leaps into
our minds is always one of catastrophe.

Generally we think of a sidereal cataclysm. There arc so
many stars hurtling around and brushing past ; there are those
exploding worlds on the horizon ; so, surely, by the implacable
laws of chance, our turn will come sooner or later and we shall
be stricken and killed ; or, at the least, wc shall have to face a
slow death in our prison.

Since physics has discovered that all energy runs down, we
seem to feel the world getting a shade chillier every day. That
cooling-off to which we were condemned Iras been partially
compensated for by another discovery, that of radio-activity,
which has happily intervened to compensate and delay the
imminent cooling. The astronomers are now in a position to
guarantee that, if all goes as it should, we have at any rate several
hundred million years ahead of us. So we can breathe again.
Yet, though the settlement is postponed, the shadow grows

longer.

And will mankind still be there to watch the evening fall ?
In the interim, apart from the cosmic mishaps that lie in wait for
us, what will happen in the living layer of the earth ? With
age and increasing complication, wc arc ever more threatened
by internal dangers at the core of both the biosphere and the
noospherc. Onslaughts of microbes, organic counter-evolutions,

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THE ULTIMATE EARTH

sterility, war, revolution — there are so many ways of coming
to an end. Yet perhaps anything would be better than a long-
drawn-out senility.

We are well aware of these different eventualities. We have
turned them over in our minds. We have read descriptions of
them in the novels of the Goncourts, Benson and Wells, or in
scientific works signed by famous names. Each one of them is
perfectly feasible. Wc could very well, and at any moment, be
crushed by a gigantic comet. And, equally true, tomorrow the
earth might quake and collapse under our feet. Taken individu-
ally, each human will can repudiate the task of ascending higher
towards union. And yet, on the strength of all we learn from
past evolution, I feel entitled to say that we have nothing what-
ever to fear from these manifold disasters in so far as they imply
the idea of premature accident or failure. However possible
they may be in theory, wc have higher reasons for being sure
that they will not happen.

All pessimistic representations of the earth's last days —
whether in terms of cosmic catastrophe, biological disruptions
or simply arrested growth or senility — have this in common :
that they take the characteristics and conditions of our individual
and elemental ends and extend them without correction to life as
a whole. Accident, disease and decrepitude spell the death of
men ; and therefore the same applies to mankind.

But have we any right to generalise in this simple way ?
When an individual disappears, even prematurely, another is
always there to replace him. His loss is not irreparable from the
point of view of the continuation of life. But what about man-
kind ? In one of his books the great palaeontologist Matthew
has suggested that if the human branch disappeared, another
thinking branch would soon take its place. But he does not tell us
where this mysterious shoot could be expected to appear on the
tree of life as we know it, and doubdess he would be hard
put to it to do so.

If wc take the whole of history into consideration, the bio-
logical situation seems to me to be quite otherwise.

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Once and once only in the course of its planetary existence
has the earth been able to envelop itself with life. Similarly
once and once only has life succeeded in crossing the threshold
of reflection. For thought as for life there has been just one season.
And we must not forget that since the birth of thought man has
been the leading shoot of the tree of life. That being so, the hopes
for the future of the noosphere (that is to say, of biogenesis,
which in the end is the same as cosmogenesis) are concentrated
exclusively upon him as such. How then could he come to an
end before his time, or stop, or deteriorate, unless the universe
committed abortion upon itself, which we have already decided
to be absurd ?

In its present state, the world would be unintelligible and the
presence in it of reflection would be incomprehensible, unless
we supposed there to be a secret complicity between the infinite
and the infinitesimal to warm, nourish and sustain to the very
end — by dint of chance, contingencies and the exercise of free
choice — the consciousness that has emerged between the two.
It is upon this complicity that we must depend. Man is irreplace-
able. Therefore, however improbable it might seem, he must
reach the goal, not necessarily, doubtless, but infallibly.

What we should expect is not a halt in any shape or form,
but an ultimate progress coming at its biologically appointed
hour ; a maturation and a paroxysm leading ever higher into
the Improbable from which we have sprung. It is in this direc-
tion that we must extrapolate man and hominisation if we
want to get a forward glimpse of the end of the world.

2. THE APPROACHES

Widiout going beyond the limits of scientific probability, we
can say diat life still has before it long periods of geological
time in which to develop. Moreover, in its thinking form, it
still shows every sign of an energy in full expansion. On the
one hand, compared with the zoological layers which preceded

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THE ULTIMATE EARTH

it whose average duration is at least in the order of eighty million
years, mankind is so young that it could almost be called new-
born. On the other hand, to judge from the rapid developments
of thought in the short period of a few dozen centuries, this
youth bears within it the indications and the promises of an
entirely new biological cycle. Thus in all probability, between
our modern earth and the ultimate earth, there stretches an
immense period, characterised not by a slowing-down but a
speeding up and by the definitive florescence of the forces of
evolution along the line of the human shoot.

Assuming success — which is the only acceptable assumption
— under what form and along what lines can we imagine progress
developing during this period ?

In the first place, in a collective and spiritual form. We have
noticed that, since man's advent, there has been a certain slowing
down of the passive and somatic transformations of the organism
in favour of the conscious and active metamorphoses of the
individual absorbed in society. We find the artificial carrying
on the work of the natural ; and the transmission of an oral or
written culture being superimposed on genetic forms of heredity
(chromosomes). Without denying the possibility or even prob-
ability of a certain prolongation in our limbs, and still more in
our nervous system, of the orthogenetic processes of the past, 1
I am inclined to think that their influence, hardly appreciable
since the emergence of Homo sapiens, is destined to dwindle still
further. As thought regulated by a sort of quantum law, the
energies of life seem unable to spread in one region or take on
a new form except at the expense of a lowering elsewhere.
Since man's arrival, the evolutionary pressure seems to have
dropped in all the non-human branches of the tree of life. And
now that man has become an adult and has opened up for
himself the field of mental and social transformations, bodies
no longer change appreciably ; they no longer need to in the

1 Taken, up again and prolonged reflectively, artificially — who knows? —
by biology (assault on the laws and springs of heredity, use of hormones, etc.,
sec pp. 249-50).

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

human branch ; or if they still change, it will only be under
our industrious control. It may well be that in its individual
capacities and penetration our brain has reached its organic
limits. But die movement does not stop there. From west to
east, evolution is henceforth occupied elsewhere, in a richer and
more complex domain, constructing, with all minds joined
together, wind. Beyond all nations and races, the inevitable
taking-as-a-whole of mankind has already begun.

With that said, we have now to ask : along what lines of
advance, among others— judging from the present condition of
the noosphere — are we destined to proceed from the planetary
level of psychic totalisation and evolutionary upsurge we are
now approaching ?

I can distinguish three principal ones in which we see again
the predictions to which we were already led by our analysis
of the ideas of science and humanity. They are : the organisation
of research, the concentration of research upon the subject of
man, and the conjunction of science and religion. These are
three natural terms of one and the same progression.

A. The Organisation of Research

We are given to boasting of our age being an age of science. And
if we arc thinking merely of the dawn compared to the darkness
that went before, up to a point we are justified. Something
enormous has been born in the universe with our discoveries
and our methods of research. Something has been started which,
I am convinced, will now never stop. Yet though we may
exalt research and derive enormous benefit from it, with what
pettiness of spirit, poverty of means and general haphazardness
do we pursue truth in the world today ! Have we ever given
serious thought to the predicament we are in ?

Like art — indeed we might almost say like thought itself—
science was bom with every sign of superfluity and fantasy. It
was born of the exuberance of an internal activity that had

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THE ULTIMATE EARTH

outstripped the material needs of life ; it was born of the
curiosity of dreamers and idlers. Gradually it became im-
portant ; its effectiveness gave it the freedom of the city. Living
in a world which it can justly be said to have revolutionised,
it has acquired a social status ; sometimes it is even worshipped.
Yet we still leave it to grow as best it can, hardly tending it,
like those wild plants whose fruits arc plucked by primitive
peoples in their forests. Everything is subordinated to the
increase in industrial production, and to armaments. The
scientist and the laboratories which multiply our powers still
receive nothing, or next to nothing. We behave as though we
expected discoveries to fall ready-made from the sky, like rain
or sunshine, while men concentrate on the serious business of
killing each other and eating. Let us stop to think for a moment
of the proportion of human energy devoted, here and now, to
the pursuit of truth. Or, in still more concrete terms, let us
glance at the percentage of a nations' revenue allotted in its budget
for the investigation of clearly-defmcd problems whose solution
would be of vital consequence for the world. If we did we
should be staggered. Less is provided annually for all the pure
research all over the world than for one capital ship. Surely
our great-grandsons will not be wrong if they think of us as
barbarians ?

The truth is that, as children of a transition period, we are
neither fully conscious of, nor in full control of, the new powers
that have been unleashed. Clinging to outworn habit, we still
see in science only a new means of providing more easily the
same old things. We put Pegasus between the traces. And
Pegasus languishes — unless he bolts with the waggon ! But the
moment will come — it is bound to — when man will be forced by
disparity of the equipage to admit that science is not an accessory
occupation for him but an essential activity, a natural derivative
of the overspill of energy constantly liberated by mechanisation.

We can envisage a world whose constantly increasing
' leisure ' and heightened interest would find their vital issue in
fathoming everything, trying everything, extending everything ;

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

a world in which giant telescopes and atom smashers would
absorb more money and excite more spontaneous admiration
than all the bombs and cannons put together; a world in which,
not only for the restricted band of paid research-workers, but
also for the man in the street, the day's ideal would be the
wresting of another secret or another force from corpuscles,
stars, or organised matter ; a world in which, as happens already,
one gives one's life to be and to know, rather than to possess.
That, on an estimate of the forces engaged, 1 is what is being
relentlessly prepared around us.

In some of the lower organisms the retina is, as it were, spread
over the whole surface of the body. In somewhat the same
way human vision is still diffuse in its operation, mixed up with
industrial activity and war. Biologically it needs to individualise
itself independendy, with its own distinct organs. It will not be
long now before the noosphere finds its eyes.

B. The Discovery of the Human Object

When mankind has once realised that its first function is to
penetrate, intellectually unify, and harness the energies which
surround it, in order still further to understand and master them,
there will no longer be any danger of running into an upper
limit of its florescence. A commercial market can reach satura-
tion point. One day, though substitutes may be found, we shall
have exhausted our mines and oil-wells. But to all appearances
nothing on earth will ever saturate our desire for knowledge or
exhaust our power for invention. For of each may be said :
crescit eundo.

That does not mean that science should propagate itself
indifFercntly in any and every direction at the same time like a
ripple in an isotropic medium. The more one looks, the more

1 External forces of planetary compression obliging humanity to totalise
itself organically in itself; and internal forces (ascendent and propulsive) of
spiritualisation, unleashed or exalted by technico-social totalisation.

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THE ULTIMATE EARTH

one sees. And the more one sees, the better one knows where
to look. If life has been able to advance, it is because, by cease-
less groping, it has successively found the points of least resist-
ance at which reality yielded to its thrust. Similarly, if research
is to progress tomorrow, it will be largely by localising the
central zones, the sensitive zones which are ' alive ', whose
conquest will afford us an easy mastery of all the rest.

From this point of view, if we are going towards a human
era of science, it will be eminently an era of human science.
Man, the knowing subject, will perceive at last that man, ' the
object of knowledge ', is the key to the whole science of nature.

Carrel referred to man as ' the unknown '. But man, we
should add, is the solution of everything that we can know.

Up to the present, whether from prejudice or fear, science
has been reluctant to look man in the face but has constantly
circled round the human object without daring to tackle it.
Materially our bodies seem insignificant, accidental, transitory
and fragile ; why bother about them ? Psychologically, our
souls are incredibly subdc and complex : how can one fit them
into a world of laws and formulas?

Yet the more persistently we try to avoid man in our theories,
the more tightly drawn become the circles wc describe around
him, as though we were caught up in his vortex. As I said in
my Preface, at the end of its analyses, physics is no longer sure
whether what is left in its hands is pure energy or, on the con-
trary, thought. At the end of its constructions, biology, if it
takes its discoveries to their logical conclusion, finds itself forced
to acknowledge the assemblage of thinking beings as die present
terminal form of evolution. We find man at the bottom, man
at the top, and, above all, man at the centre — man who lives
and struggles desperately in us and around us. We shall have to
come to grips with him sooner or later.

Man is, if 1 have not gone astray in these pages, an object
of study of unique value to science for two reasons, (i) He
represents, individually and socially, the most synthesised state
under which the stuff of the universe is available to us. (ii)

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Correctively, he is at present the most mobile point of the stuff
in course of transformation.

For these two reasons, to decipher man is essentially to try
to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go
on making itself. The science of man is the practical and theoreti-
cal science of hominisation. It means profound study of the past
and of origins. But still more, it means constructive experiment
pursued on a continually renewed object. The programme is
immense and its only end or aim is that of the future.

What is involved, firstly, is the care and improvement of
the human body, the health and strength of the organism. So
long as its phase of immersion in the ' tangential ' lasts, thought
can only be built up on this material basis. And now, in the
tumult of ideas that accompany the awakening of the mind,
are we not undergoing physical degeneration ? It has been said
that we might well blush comparing our own mankind, so full
of misshapen subjects, with those animal societies in which, in a
hundred thousand individuals, not one will be found lacking in
a single antenna. In itself that geometrical perfection is not in
the line of our evolution whose bent is towards suppleness and
freedom. All the same, suitably subordinated to other values,
it may well appear as an indication and a lesson. So far we
have certainly allowed our race to develop at random, and we
have given too little thought to the question of what medical
and moral factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection
should we suppress them. In the course of the coming centuries
it is indispensable that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a
standard worthy of our personalities, should be discovered and
developed.

Eugenics applied to individuals leads to eugenics applied to
society. It would be more convenient, and we would incline
to think it safe, to leave the contours of that great body made
of all our bodies to take shape on their own, influenced only by
the automatic play of individual urges and whims. ' Better not
interfere with the forces of the world ! ' Once more we are
up against the mirage o( instinct, the so-called infallibility of

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THE ULTIMATE EARTH

nature. But is it not precisely the world itself which, culminat-
ing in thought, expects us to think out again the instinctive
impulses of nature so as to perfect them ? Reflective substance
requires reflective treatment. If there is a future for mankind,
it can only be imagined in terms of a harmonious conciliation
of what is free with what is planned and totalised. Points
involved are : the distribution of the resources of the globe ;
the control of the trek towards unpopulated areas ; the optimum
use of the powers set free by mechanisation ; the physiology of
nations and races; geo-economy, geo-politics, geo-demography;
the organisation of research developing into a reasoned organ-
isation of the earth. Whether we like it or not, all the signs and
all our needs converge in the same direction. We need and are
irresistibly being led to create, by means of and beyond all
physics, all biology and all psychology, a science of human energetics.
It is in the course of that creation, already obscurely begun,
that science, by being led to concentrate on man, will find itself
increasingly face to face with religion.

c.

The Conjunction oj Science and Religion

To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an
anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and
reason supplanting belief. Our generation and the two that
preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between
science and faith ; indeed it seemed at one moment a foregone
conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of
the latter.

But, as the tension is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to
need to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of
equilibrium — not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis.
After close on two centuries of passionate struggles, neither
science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its adversary. On
the contrary, it becomes obvious that neither can develop
normally without the other. And the reason is simple : the

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

same life animates both. Neither in its impetus nor its achieve-
ments can science go to its limits without becoming tinged with
mysticism and charged with faith,

Firstly in its impetus. We touched on this point when dealing
with the problem of action. Man will only continue to work
and to research so long as he is prompted by a passionate interest.
Now this interest is entirely dependent on the conviction, strictly
undemonstrable to science, that the universe has a direction
and that it could— indeed, if we are faithful, it should— result
in some sort of irreversible perfection. Hence comes belief in

progress.

Secondly in its construction. Scientifically we can envisage an
almost indefinite improvement in the human organism and
human society. But as soon as we try to put our dreams into
practice, we realise that the problem remains indeterminate or
even insoluble unless, with some partially super-rational intuition,
we admit the convergent properties of the world we belong to.
Hence belief in unity.

Furthermore, if we decide, under the pressure of facts, in
favour of an optimism of unification, we run into the technical
necessity of discovering — in addition to the impetus required to
push us forward and in addition to the particular objective which
should determine our route — the special binder or cement which
will associate our lives together, vitally, without diminishing or
distorting them. Hence, belief in a supremely attractive centre
which has personality.

In short, as soon as science outgrows the analytic investiga-
tions which constitute its lower and preliminary stages, and
passes on to synthesis — synthesis which naturally culminates in
the realisation of some superior state of humanity — it is at once
led to foresee and place its stakes on the future and on the all.
And with that it out-distances itself and emerges in terms of
option and adoration.

Thus Renan and the nineteenth century were not wrong to
speak of a Religion of Science. Their mistake was not to see
that their cult of humanity implied the re-integration, in a re-

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THE ULTIMATE EARTH

newed form, of those very spiritual forces they claimed to be
getting rid of.

When, in the universe in movement to which we have just
awakened, we look at the temporal and spatial series diverging
and amplifying themselves around and behind us like the laminae
of a cone, we are perhaps engaging in pure science. But when
we turn towards the summit, towards the totality and the future,
we cannot help engaging in religion.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases
of one and the same complete act of knowledge — the only one
which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to
contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

In the mutual reinforcement of these two still opposed
powers, in the conjunction of reason and mysticism, the human
spirit is destined, by the very nature of its development, to find
the uttermost degree of its penetration with the maximum of
its vital force.

3. THE ULTIMATE

Always pushing forward in the three directions we have just
indicated, and taking advantage of the immense duration it has
still to live, mankind has enormous possibilities before it.

Until the coming of man, life was quickly arrested and
hemmed in by the specialisations into which it was forced to
mould itself so as to act, and became fixed, then dispersed, at
each forward bound. Since the threshold of reflection, wc have
entered into an entirely new field of evolution — thanks to the
astonishing properties of 'artifice' which separate the instrument
from the organ and enable one and the same creature to intensify
and vary the modalities of its action indefinitely without losing
anything of its freedom ; and thanks to the prodigious power
of thought to bring together and combine in a single conscious
effort all the human particles. In fact, though the study of the
past may give us some idea of the resources of organised matter

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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

in its dispersed state, we have as yet no idea of the possible magnitude
of 'noospheric' effects. We are confronted with human
vibrations resounding by the million-a whole layer of con-
sciousness exerting simultaneous pressure upon the future and
the collected and hoarded produce of a million years of thought.
Have we ever tried to form an idea of what such magnitudes

represent P 1

In this direction, the most unexpected is perhaps what we
should most expect. Under the increasing tension of the mind
on the surface of the globe, we may begin by asking serious y
whether life will not perhaps one day succeed in ingeniously
forcing the bars of its earthly prison, either by finding the means
to invade other inhabited planets or (a still more giddy per-
spective) by getting into psychical touch with other focal points
of consciousness across the abysses of space. The meeting and
mutual fecundation of two noosphcres is a supposition which may
seem at fust sight crazy, but which after all is merely extending
to psychical phenomena a scope no-one would think of denying
to material phenomena. Consciousness would thus finally con-
struct itself by a synthesis of planetary units. Why not, in a
universe whose astral unit is the galaxy ?

Without in any way wishing to discourage such hypotheses
—whose realisation, though enormously enlarging the dimen-
sions, would leave unchanged both the convergent form and
hence the final duration of noogenesis— I consider their prob-
ability too remote for them to be worth dwelling on.

The human organism is so extraordinarily complicated and

1 Over and above the intellectual value of isolated human units, there are
thus grounds for recognising a collective exaltation (by mutual support or
reverberation) when those units are suitably arranged. It would be difficult
to say whether there are any Aristotles, Platos or St. Augustines now on earth
(how could it be proved : on the other hand why not?) But what is clear is
that, each supporting the other (making a single arch or a single mirror), our
modern souls sec and feel today a world such as (in size, inter-connections and
potentialities) escaped all the great men of antiquity. To this progress in
consciousness, could anyone dare to object that there has been no corresponding
advance in the profound structure of being?

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THE ULTIMATE EARTH

sensitive, and so closely adapted to terrestrial conditions, that it
is difficult to see how man could acclimatise himself to another
planet, even if he were capable of navigating through inter-
planetary space. The sidereal durations are so immense that it is
difficult to see how in two different regions of the heavens, two
thought systems could co-exist and coincide at comparable stages
of their development. For these two reasons among others I
adopt the supposition that our noosphere is destined to close
in upon itself in isolation, and that it is in a psychical rather than
a spatial direction that it will find an outlet, without need to
leave or overflow the earth. Hence, quite naturally, the notion
of change of state recurs.

Noogenesis rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly.
We have pointed to the principal characteristics of that move-
ment : the closer association of the grains of thought ; the
synthesis of individuals and of nations or races ; the need of an
autonomous and supreme personal focus to bind elementary
personalities together, without deforming them, in an atmosphere
of active sympathy. And, once again : all this results from the
combined action of two curvatures — the roundness of the earth
and the cosmic convergence of mind — in conformity with the
law of complexity and consciousness.

Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated,
this essentially convergent movement will attain such intens-
ity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be
obliged — as happened to the individual forces of instinct — to
reflect upon itself at a single point j 1 that is to say, in this case,
to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre
on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration.
This will be the end and the fulfilment of the spirit of the earth.

The end of the world : the wholesale internal introversion
upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached
the uttermost limit of its complexity and its ccntrality.

The end of the world : the overthrow of equilibrium,

1 Which amounts to saying that human history develops between two points
of reflection, the one inferior and individual, the other superior and collective.

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THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix,
so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega.
The end of the world : critical point simultaneously of
emergence and emersion, of maturation and escape.

We can entertain two almost contradictory suppositions about
the physical and psychical state our planet will be in as it
approaches maturation. 1 According to the first hypothesis which
expresses the hopes towards which we ought in any case to turn
our efforts as to an ideal, evil on the earth at its final stage will
be reduced to a minimum. Disease and hunger will be conquered
by science and we will no longer need to fear them in any acute
form. And, conquered by the sense of the earth and human
sense, hatred and internecine struggles will have disappeared in
the ever-warmer radiance of Omega. Some sort of unanimity
will reign over the entire mass of the noosphere. The final con-
vergence will take place in peace. 2 Such an outcome would of
course conform most harmoniously with our theory.

But there is another possibility. Obeying a law from which
nothing in the past has ever been exempt, evil may go on grow-
ing alongside good, and it too may attain its paroxysm at the
end in some specifically new form.

There are no summits without abysses.
Enormous powers will be liberated in mankind by the inner
play of its cohesion : though it may be that this energy will
still be employed discordandy tomorrow, as today and in the
past. Are we to foresee a mechanising synergy under brute
force, or a synergy of sympathy ? Are we to foresee man seeking
to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a
greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? A
conflict may supervene. In that case the noosphere, in the course
of and by virtue of the process which draws it together, will,

1 On the degree of ' inevitability ' of this maturation of a free mass, see
Conclusion, p. 309.

8 Though at the same time— since a critical point is being approached— in
extreme tension. There is nothing in common between this perspective and the
old millenary dreams of a terrestrial paradise at the end of time.

288

THE ULTIMATE EARTH

when it has reached its point of unification, split into two zones
each attracted to an opposite pole of adoration. Thought has
never completely united upon itself here below. Universal love
would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere
so as to consummate it — the part which decided to ' cross the
threshold ', to get outside itself into the other. Ramification once
again, for the last time.

In this second hypothesis, which is more in conformity with
traditional apocalyptic thinking, we may perhaps discern three
curves around us rising up at one and the same time into the
future : an inevitable education in die organic possibilities of
the earth, an internal schism of consciousness ever increasingly
divided on two opposite ideals of evolution, and positive attrac-
tion of the centre of centres at the heart of those who turn
towards it. And die earth would finish at the triple point at
which, by a coincidence altogether in keeping with the ways
of life, these three curves would meet and attain their maximum
at the very same moment.

The death of the materially exhausted planet ; the split of
the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity ; and
simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and
with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe
which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in labori-
ously synthesising itself to the very end.

Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contra-
dicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy
transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible
universe.

Ecstasy in concord ; or discord ; but in either case by excess
of interior tension : the only biological outcome proper to or
conceivable for the phenomenon of man.

Among those who have attempted to read this book to the
end, many will close it, dissatisfied and thoughtful, wondering
whether I have been leading them through facts, through meta-
physics or through dreams.

289

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

But have those who still hesitate in this way really under-
stood the rigorous and salutary conditions imposed on our
reason by the coherence of the universe, now admitted by all ?
A mark appearing on a film; an electroscope discharging abnor-
mally ; that is enough to force physics to accept fantastic powers
in the 'atom. Similarly, if we try to bring man, body and soul,
within the framework of what is experimental, man obliges us
to readjust completely to his measure the layers of time and space.
To make room for thought in the world, I have needed to
' interiorise ' matter : to imagine an energetics of the mind ; to
conceive a noogenesis rising upstream against the flow of
entropy ; to provide evolution with a direction, a line of advance
and critical points ; and finally to make all things double back

upon someone.

In this arrangement of values I may have gone astray at many
points. It is up to others to try to do better. My one hope is
that I have made the reader feel both the reality, difficulty, and
urgency of the problem and, at the same time, the scale and the
form which the solution cannot escape.

The only universe capable of containing the human person
is an irreversibly ' personalising ' universe.

290

EPILOGUE

THE CHRISTIAN PHENOMENON

Neither in the play of its elemental activities, which can only
be set in motion by the hope of an ' imperishable ' ; nor in the
play of its collective affinities, which require for their coalescence
the action of a conquering love, can reflective life continue to
function and to progress unless, above it, there is a pole which
is supreme in attraction and consistence. By its very structure
the noosphcre could not close itself either individually or socially
in any way save under the influence of the centre we have
called Omega.

That is the postulate to which we have been led logically by
the integral application to man of the experimental laws of
evolution. The possible, or even the probable, repercussion of
this conclusion, however theoretical in the first approximation,
upon experience will now be obvious.

If Omega were only a remote and ideal focus destined to
emerge at the end of time from the convergence of terrestrial
consciousnesses, nothing could make it known to us but this
convergence. At the present time no other energy of a personal
nature could be detected on earth save that represented by the
sum of human persons.

If, on the other hand, Omega is, as we have admitted, already
in existence and operative at the very core of the thinking mass,
then it would seem inevitable that its existence should be mani-
fested to us here and now through some traces. To animate
evolution in its lower stages, the conscious pole of the world
could of course only act in an impersonal form and under the

291

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

veil of biology. Upon the thinking entity that we have become
by hominisation, it is now possible for it to radiate from the one
centre to all centres— personally. Would it seem likely that it
should not do so ?

Either the whole construction of the world presented here
is vain ideology or, somewhere around us, in one form or
another, some excess of personal, extra-human energy should be
perceptible to us if we look carefully, and should reveal to us
the great Presence. It is at this point that we see the importance
for science of the Christian phenomenon.

At the conclusion of a study of the human phenomenon I
have not chosen those words haphazardly, nor for the sake of
mere verbal symmetry. They are meant to define without
ambiguity the spirit in which I want to speak.

As I am living at the heart of the Christian world, I might be
suspected of wanting to introduce an apologia by artifice. But,
here again, so far as it is possible for a man to separate in himself
the various planes of knowledge, it is not the convinced believer
but the naturalist who is asking for a hearing.

The Christian fact stands before us. It has its place among
the other realities of the world.

I would like to show how it seems to me to bring to the
perspectives of a universe dominated by energies of a personal
nature the crucial confirmation we are in need of, firstly by the
substance of its creed, next, by its existence-value, and finally by
its extraordinary power of growth.

i. AXES OF BELIEF

To those who only know it outwardly, Christianity seems
desperately intricate. In reality, taken in its main lines, it con-
tains an extremely simple and astonishingly bold solution of the
world.

In the centre, so glaring as to be disconcerting, is the uncom-

292

EPILOGUE

promising affirmation of a personal God : God as providence,
directing the universe with loving, watchful care ; and God the
revealer, communicating himself to man on the level of and
through the ways of intelligence. It will be easy for me, after
all I have said, to demonstrate the value and actuality of this
tenacious personalism, not long since condemned as obsolete.
The important thing to point out here is the way in which such
an attitude in the hearts of the faithful leaves the door open to,
and is easily allied to, everything that is great and healthy in
the universal.

In its Judaic phase, Christianity might well have considered
itself the particular religion of one people. Later on, coming
under the general conditions of human knowledge, it came to
think that the world around it was much too small. However
that may be, it was hardly constituted before it was ceaselessly
trying to englobe in its constructions and conquests the totality
of the system that it managed to picture to itself.

Personalism and universalism : in what form have these two
characters been able to unite in its theology ?

For reasons of practical convenience and perhaps also of
intellectual timidity, the City of God is too often described in
pious works in conventional and purely moral terms. God
and the world he governs are seen as a vast association, essen-
tially legalistic in its nature, conceived in terms of a family or
government. The fundamental root from which the sap of
Christianity has risen from the beginning and is nourished, is
quite otherwise. Led astray by a false evangelism, people often
think they are honouring Christianity when they reduce it to a
sort of gentle philanthropism. Those who fail to see in it the
most realistic and at the same time the most cosmic of beliefs
and hopes, completely fail to understand its ' mysteries '. Is the
Kingdom of God a big family ? Yes, in a sense it is. But in
another sense it is a prodigious biological operation — that of the
Redeeming Incarnation.

As early as in St. Paul and St. John we read that to create, to
fulfil and to purify the world is, for God, to unify it by uniting it

293

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

organically with himself. 1 How docs he unify it ? By partially
immersing himself in things, by becoming ' element ', and then,
from this point of vantage in the heart of matter, assuming the
control and leadership of what we now call evolution. Christ,
principle of universal vitality because sprung up as man among
men, put himself in the position (maintained ever since) to
subdue under himself, to purify, to direct and superanimate the
general ascent of consciousnesses into which he inserted himself.

1111

By a perennial act of communion and sublimation, he aggre-
gates to himself the total psychism of the earth. And when he
has gathered everything together and transformed everything,
he will close in upon himself and his conquests, thereby rejoining,
in a final gesture, the divine focus he has never left. Then, as
St. Paul tells us, God shall be all in all. This is indeed a superior
form of ' pantheism '* without trace of the poison of adultera-
tion or annihilation : the expectation of perfect unity, steeped
in which each element will reach its consummation at the same
time as the universe.

The universe fulfilling itself in a synthesis of centres in perfect
conformity with the laws of union. God, the Centre of centres.
In that final vision the Christian dogma culminates. And so
exacdy, so perfecdy does this coincide with the Omega Point
that doubtless I should never have ventured to envisage the latter
or formulate the hypothesis rationally if, in my consciousness
as a believer, I had not found not only its speculative model
but also its living reality.

2. EXISTENCE VALUE

It is relatively easy to build up a theory of the world. But it is
beyond the powers of an individual to provoke artificially the

1 Following Greek thought — following all thought in fact — are not ' to be '
and ' to be one ' identical ?
8 ' En pasi pant a Theos.'

294

EPILOGUB

birth of a religion. Plato, Spinoza and Hegel were able to
elaborate views which compete in amplitude with the per-
spectives of the Incarnation. Yet none of these metaphysical
systems advanced beyond the limits of an ideology. Each in
turn has perhaps brought light to men's minds, but without
ever succeeding in begetting life. What to the eyes of a ' natural-
ist ' comprises the importance and the enigma of the Christian
phenomenon is its existence-value and reality-value.

Christianity is in the first place real by virtue of the spon-
taneous amplitude of the movement it has managed to create
in mankind. It addresses itself to every man and to every class
of man, and from the start it took its place as one of the most
vigorous and fruitful currents the noosphere has ever known.
Whether we adhere to it or break off from it, we are surely
obliged to admit that its stamp and its enduring influence are
apparent in every corner of the earth today.

It is doubtless a quantitative value of life if measured by its
radius of action; but it is still more a qualitative value which
expresses itself— like all biological progress — by the appearance
of a specifically new state of consciousness.

I am thinking here of Christian love.

Christian love is incomprehensible to those who have not
experienced it. That the infinite and the intangible can be
lovable, or that the human heart can beat with genuine charity
for a fellow-being, seems impossible to many people I know
— in fact almost monstrous. But whether it be founded on an
illusion or not, how can we doubt that such a sentiment exists,
and even in great intensity ? We have only to note crudely the
results it produces unceasingly all round us. Is it not a positive
fact that thousands of mystics, ■ for twenty centuries, have
drawn from its flame a passionate fervour that outstrips by far in
brightness and purity the urge and devotion of any human
love? is it not also a fact that, having once experienced it, further
thousands of men and women are daily renouncing every other
ambition and every other joy save that of abandoning themselves
to it and labouring within it more and more completely ?

295

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Lastly, is it not a fact, as I can warrant, that if the love of God
were extinguished in the souls of the faithful, the enormous
edifice of rites, of hierarchy and of doctrines that comprise
the Church would instantly revert to the dust from which it
rose ?

It is a phenomenon of capital importance for the science of
man that, over an appreciable region of the earth, a zone of
thought has appeared and grown in which a genuine universal
love has not only been conceived and preached, but has also
been shown to be psychologically possible and operative in
practice. It is all the more capital inasmuch as, far from decreas-
ing, the movement seems to wish to gain still greater speed and
intensity.

3. POWER OF GROWTH

For almost all the ancient religions, the renewal of cosmic
outlook characterising ' the modern mind ' has occasioned a
crisis of such severity that, if they have not yet been killed
by it, it is plain they will never recover. Narrowly bound to
untenable myths, or steeped in a pessimistic and passive mysticism,
they can adjust themselves neither to the precise immensities, nor
to die constructive requirements, of space-time. They are out of
step both with our science and with our activity.

But under the shock which is rapidly causing its rivals to
disappear, Christianity, which might at first have been thought
to be shaken too, is showing, on the contrary, every sign of
forging ahead. For, by the very fact of the new dimensions
assumed by the universe as we see it today, it reveals itself both
as inherently more vigorous in itself and as more necessary to
the world than it has ever been before.

More vigorous. To live and develop the Christian outlook needs
an atmosphere of greatness and of coherence. The bigger the
world becomes and the more organic become its internal con-
nections, the more will die perspectives of the Incarnation

296

EPILOGUE

triumph. That is what believers are beginning, much to their
surprise, to find out. Though frightened for a moment by evolu-
tion, the Christian now perceives that what it offers him is
nothing but a magnificent means of feeling more at one with
God and of giving himself more to him. In a pluralistic and static
Nature, the universal domination of Christ could, strictly speak-
ing, still be regarded as an extrinsic and super-imposed power.
In a spiritually converging world this ' Christie ' energy acquires
an urgency and intensity of another order altogether. If the world
is convergent and if Christ occupies its centre, then the Christo-
genesis of St. Paul and St. John is nothing else and nothing less
than the extension, both awaited and unhoped for, of that noo-
genesis in which cosmogenesis — as regards our experience —
culminates. Christ invests himself organically with the very
majesty of his creation. And it is in no way metaphorical to say
that man tmds himself capable of experiencing and discovering
his God in the whole length, breadth and depth of the world in
movement. To be able to say literally to God that one loves him,
not only with all one's body, all one's heart and all one's soul,
but with every fibre of the unifying universe — that is a prayer
that can only be made in space-time.

More necessary. To say of Christianity that, despite appear-
ances to the contrary, it is acclimatising itself and expanding
in a world enormously enlarged by science, is to point to no
more than one half of the picture. Evolution has come to infuse
new blood, so to speak, into the perspectives and aspirations
of Christianity. In return, is not the Christian faith destined,
is it not preparing, to save and even to take the place of evolu-
tion ?

I have tried to show that we can hope for no progress on
earth without the primacy and triumph of the personal at the
summit of mind. And at the present moment Christianity
is the unique current of thought, on the entire surface of the
noosphere, which is sufficiently audacious and sufficiently pro-
gressive to lay hold of the world, at the level of effectual practice,
in an embrace, at once already complete, yet capable of indefinite

297

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

perfection, where faith and hope reach their fulfilment in love.
Alone, unconditionally alone, in the world today, Christianity
shows itself able to reconcile, in a single living act, the All and
the Person. Alone, it can bend our hearts not only to the service
of that tremendous movement of the world which bears us along,
but beyond, to embrace that movement in love.

In other words can we not say that Christianity fulfils all the
conditions we are entitled to expect from a religion of the
future ; and that hence, through it, the principal axis of evolution
truly passes, as it maintains ?

Now let us sum up the situation :
i. Considered objectively asa phenomenon, the Christian move-
ment, through its rootedness in the past and ceaseless develop-
ments, exhibits the characteristics of a phylum.
ii. Reset in an evolution interpreted as an ascent of consciousness,
this phylum, in its trend towards a synthesis based on love, pro-
gresses precisely in the direction presumed for the leading-shoot
of biogenesis.

iii. In the impetus which guides and sustains its advance, this
rising shoot implies essentially the consciousness of being in actual
relationship with a spiritual and transcendent pole of universal
convergence.

To confirm the presence at the summit of the world of what
we have called the Omega Point, 1 do we not find here the very
cross-check we were waiting for ? Here surely is the ray of
sunshine striking through the clouds, the reflection onto what is
ascending of that which is already on high, die rupture of our
solitude. The palpable influence on our world of an other and
supreme Someone ... Is not die Christian phenomenon, which

1 To be more exact, ' to confirm the presence at the summit of the world
of something in line with, but still more elevated than, the Omega point '.
This is in deference to the theological concept of the ' supernatural ' according
to which the binding contact between God and the world, hk el nunc inchoate,
attains to a super-intimacy (hence also a super-gratuitousness) of which man
can have no inkling and to which he can lay no claim by virtue of his ' nature '
alone.

298

EPILOGUE

rises upwards at the heart of the social phenomenon, precisely
that?

In the presence of such perfection in coincidence, even if I
were not a Christian but only a man of science, I think I would
ask myself this question.

Peking, June 1938-June 1940

299

SUMMING UP OR POSTSCRIPT

THE ESSENCE OF
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

Since this book was composed, I have experienced no change in
the intuition it seeks to express. Taken as a whole, I still see
man today exactly as I saw him when I first wrote these pages.
Yet the basic vision has not remained — it could not remain —
stationary. By the irresistible deepening of reflection, by the
decantation and automatic patterning of associated ideas, by the
discovery of new facts and by the continual need to be better
understood, certain new formulations and articulations have
gradually occurred to me in the last ten years. They tend to
emphasise, and at the same time to simplify, the main lines of
my earlier draft.

It is this unchanged, though recogitated, essence of the Pheno-
menon of Man which I think it will be useful to set out here as
a summing-up or conclusion under three inter-related headings :

i. A WORLD IN INVOLUTION,

OR THE COSMIC LAW

OF COMPLEXITY-CONSCIOUSNESS

The astronomers have lately been making us familiar with the
idea of a universe which for the last few thousand million years
has been expanding in galaxies from a sort of primordial atom.
This perspective of a world in a state of explosion is still debated,
but no physicist would think of rejecting it as being tainted with

300

POSTSCRIPT

philosophy or finalism. The reader should keep this example
before him when he comes to weigh up the scope, the limita-
tions and the perfect scientific legitimacy of the views I have
here put forward. Reduced to its ultimate essence, the substance
of these long pages can be summed up in this simple affirma-
tion : that if the universe, regarded sidereally, is in process of
spatial expansion (from the infinitesimal to the immense), in the
same way and still more clearly it presents itself to us, physico-
chemically, as in process of organic involution upon itself (from
the extremely simple to the extremely complex) — and, moreover,
this particular involution ' of complexity ' is experimentally
bound up with a correlative increase in interiorisation, that is to
say in the psyche or consciousness.

In the narrow domain of our planet (still the only one within
the scope of biology) the structural relationship noted here
between complexity and consciousness is experimentally incon-
testable and has always been known. What gives the standpoint
taken in this book its originality is the affirmation, at the outset,
that the particular property possessed by terrestrial substances — of
becoming more vitalised as they become increasingly complex —
is only the local manifestation and expression of a trend as
universal as (and no doubt even more significant than) those
already identified by science : those trends which cause the
cosmic layers not only to expand explosively as a wave but
also to condense into corpuscles under the action of electro-
magnetic and gravitational forces, or perhaps to become de-
materialised in radiation : trends which are probably stricdy
inter-connected, as we shall one day realise.

If that be so, it will be seen that consciousness (defined
experimentally as the specific effect of organised complexity)
transcends by far the ridiculously narrow limits within which
our eyes can directly perceive it.

On the one hand we are logically forced to assume the
existence in rudimentary form (in a microscopic, i.e. an infinitely
diffuse, state) of some sort of psyche in every corpuscle, even
in those (the mega-molecules and below) whose complexity is

301

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

of such a low or modest order as to render it (the psyche) imper-
ceptible—just as the physicist assumes and can calculate those
changes of mass (utterly imperceptible to direct observation)
occasioned by slow movement.

On the other hand, there precisely in the world where various
physical conditions (temperature, gravity, etc.) prevent com-
plexity reaching a degree involving a perceptible radiation of
consciousness, we are led to assume that the involution, tem-
porarily halted, will resume its advance as soon as conditions
are favourable.

Regarded along its axis of complexity, the universe is, both
on the whole and at each of its points, in a continual tension of
organic doubling-back upon itself, and thus of interiorisation.
Which amounts to saying that, for science, life is always under
pressure everywhere ; and that where it has succeeded in breaking
through in an appreciable degree, nothing will be able to stop
it carrying to the uttermost limit the process from which it has
sprung.

It is in my opinion necessary to take one's stand in this actively
convergent cosmic setting if one wants to depict the phenomenon
of man in its proper relief and explain it fully and coherently.

2. THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF MAN,

OR THE INDIVIDUAL THRESHOLD

OF REFLECTION

So as to overcome the improbability of arrangements leading
to units of ever increasing complexity, the involuting universe,
considered in its pre-reflective zones, 1 proceeds step by step by
dint of billion-fold trial and error. It is this process of groping,
combined with the two-fold mechanism of reproduction and
heredity (allowing the hoarding and the additive improvement

1 Once the threshold of reflection is crossed, the play of ' planned ' or
' invented ' combinations come into the picture, and to some extent supplants
that of fortuitous combinations that 'just happen '. See below.

302

POSTSCRIPT

of favourable combinations obtained, without the diminution,
indeed with the increase, of the number of individuals engaged),
which gives rise to the extraordinary assemblage of living stems
forming what I have called the tree of life — though I could
equally well have chosen another image, that of the spectrum,
in which each wavelength would correspond to a particular
shade of consciousness or instinct.

From one point of view, the various stems of this psychical
fan may seem (indeed they are often so regarded by science) to
be vitally equivalent — -just so many instincts, so many equally
valid solutions to a given problem, comparison between which
is futile. A second original point in my position in The Pheno-
menon of Man — apart from the interpretation of life as a universal
function of the cosmos — lies, on the contrary, in giving the
appearance on the human line of the power of reflection the
value of a ' threshold ' or a change of state. This affirmation is
far from being an unwarranted assumption or based initially on
any metaphysics of thought. It is a choice depending experi-
mentally on the curiously underestimated fact that, from the
threshold of reflection onwards, we are at what is nothing less
than a new form of biological existence, 1 characterised, amongst
other peculiarities, by the following properties :

a. The decisive emergence in individual life of factors of internal
arrangement (invention) above the factors of external arrange-
ment (utilisation of the play of chance).

b. The equally decisive appearance between elements of true
forces of attraction and repulsion (sympathy and antipathy),
replacing the pseudo-attractions and pseudo-repulsions of pre-life
or even of the lower forms of life, which we seem to be able to
refer back to simple reactions to the curves of space-time in the
one case, and of the biosphere in the other.

1 In exactly the same way as physics changes (with the introduction and
dominance of certain new terms) when it passes from the scale of the medium-
sized to that of the immense or, on the other hand, to that of the infinitesimal.
It is too often forgotten that there should be, and is, a special biology of the
' infinitely complex '.

303

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

c. Lastly, the awakening in the consciousness of each particular
element (consequent upon its new and revolutionary aptitude
for foreseeing the future) of a demand for ' unlimited survival '.
That is to say, the passage, for life, from a state of relative irre-
versibility (die physical impossibility of the cosmic involution
to stop, once it has begun) to a state of absolute irreversibility
(the radical dynamic incompatibility of a certain prospect of
total death with the continuation of an evolution that has become
reflective).

These various properties confer on the zoological group
possessing them a superiority that is not only quantitative and
numerical, but functional and vital— an indisputable superiority,
I maintain, provided that we make up our minds to apply relent-
lessly and to the bitter end the experimental law of Complexity-
Consciousness to the global evolution of the entire group.

3. THE SOCIAL PHENOMENON OR THE

ASCENT TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE

THRESHOLD OF REFLECTION

As we have seen, from a purely descriptive point of view, man
was originally only one of innumerable branches forming the
anatomic and psychic ramifications of life. But because this
parucular stem, or radius, alone among others, has succeeded,
thanks to a privileged structure or position, in emerging from
insunct into thought, it proves itself capable of spreading out
m its turn, within this still completely free zone of the world
so as to form a spectrum of another order-the immense variety"
of anthropological types known to us. Let us take a glance at
this second fanning-out. In virtue of the particular form of
cosmogenesis adopted here, the problem our existence sets
before our science is plainly the following : To what extent and
eventually under what form does the human layer still obey
(or is exempt from) the forces of cosmic involution which gave
it birth ? &

304

POSTSCRIPT

The answer to this question is vital for our conduct, and
depends entirely on the idea we form (or rather ought to form)
of the nature of the social phenomenon as we now see it in
full impetus around us.

As a matter of intellectual routine and because of the positive
difficulty of mastering a process in which we are ourselves
swept along, the constantly increasing auto-organisation of the
human myriad upon itself is still regarded more often than not as a
juridical or accidental process only superficially, ' extrinsically ',
comparable with those of biology. Naturally, it is admitted,
mankind has always been increasing, which forces it to make
more and more complex arrangements for its members. But
these modus vivendi must not be confused with genuine onto-
logical progress. From an evolutionary point of view, man has
stopped moving, if he ever did move.

And this is where, as a man of science, I feel obliged to make
my protest and object.

A certain sort of common sense 1 tells us that with man
biological evolution has reached its ceiling : in reflecting upon
itself, life has become stationary. But should we not rather say
that it leaps forward ? Look at the way in which, as mankind
technically patterns its multitudes, pari passu the psychic tension
within it increases, with the consciousness of time and space
and the taste for, and power of, discovery. This great event
we accept without surprise. Yet how can one fail to recognise
this revealing association of technical organisation and inward
spiritual concentration as the work of the same great force
(though in proportions and with a depth hitherto never attained),
the very force which brought us into being ? How can we fail
to see that after rolling us on individually — all of us, you and
me — upon our own selves, it is still the same cyclone (only now
on the social scale) which is still blowing over our heads, driving
us together into a contact which tends to perfect each one of us
by linking him organically to each and all of his neighbours ?

1 The same ' common sense ' which has again and again been corrected
beyond all question by physics.

305

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

' Through human socialisation, whose specific effect is to
involute upon itself the whole bundle of reflexive scales and
fibres of the earth, it is the very axis of the cosmic vortex of
interiorisation which is pursuing its course ' : replacing and
emending the two preliminary postulates stated above (the one
concerning the primacy of life in the universe, the other the
p/imacy of reflection in life) this is the third option — the most
d,!cisive of all — which completes the definition and clarification
o I my scientific position as regards the phenomenon of man.

This is not the place to show in detail how easily and co-
herently this organic interpretation of the social phenomenon
explains, or even in some directions allows us to predict, the
course of history. Let it merely be stated that, if above the
elementary hominisation that culminates in each individual, there
is really developing above us another hominisation, a collective
one of the whole species, then it is quite natural to observe,
parallel with the socialisation of humanity, the same three
psycho-biological properties rising upwards on the earth that
the individual step to reflection originally produced.

a. Firstly the power of invention, so rapidly intensified at the
present time by the, rationalised collaboration of all the forces of
research that it is already possible to speak of a human rebound of
evolution.

b. Next, capacity for attraction (or repulsion), still operating
in a chaotic way throughout the world but rising so rapidly
around us that (whatever be said to the contrary) economics will
soon count for very little in comparison with the ideological
and the emotional factors in the arrangement of the world.

c. Lasdy and above all, the demand for irreversibility. This
emerges from the still somewhat hesitating zone of individual
aspirations, so as to find categorical expression in consciousness
and through the voice of the species. Categorical in the sense
that, if an isolated man can succeed in imagining that it is pos-
sible physically, or even morally, for him to contemplate a
complete suppression of himself— confronted with a total anni-
hilation (or even simply with an insufficient preservation)

306

POSTSCRIPT

destined for the fruit of his evolutionary labour — mankind, in
its turn, is beginning to realise once and for all that its only
course would be to go on strike. For the effort to push the earth
forward is much too heavy, and the task threatens to go on
much too long, for us to continue to accept it, unless we are to
work in what is incorruptible.

These and other assembled pointers seem to me to constitute
a serious scientific proof that (in conformity with the universal
law of centro-complexity) the zoological group of mankind —
far from drifting biologically, under the influence of exaggerated
individualism, towards a state of growing granulation ; far from
turning (through space-travel) to an escape from death by
sidereal expansion ; or yet again far from simply declining
towards a catastrophe or senility — the human group is in fact
turning, by planetary arrangement and convergence of all
elemental terrestrial reflections, towards a second critical pole
of reflection of a collective and higher order ; towards a point
beyond which (precisely because it is critical) we can see nothing
direcdy, but a point through which we can nevertheless prog-
nosticate the contact between thought, born of involution upon
itself of the stuff of the universe, and that transcendent focus we
call Omega, the principle which at one and the same time makes
this involution irreversible and moves and gathers it in.

It only remains for me, in bringing this work to a close, to define
my opinion on three matters which usually puzzle my readers :
(a) what place remains for freedom (and hence for the possi-
bility of a setback in the world) ? (b) what value must be given
to spirit (as opposed to matter) ? and (c) what is the distinction
between God and the World in the theory of cosmic involution ?
a. As regards the chances of success of cosmogenesis, my con-
tention is that it in no way follows from the position taken up
here that the final success of hominisation is necessary, inevitable
and certain. Without doubt, the ' noogenic ' forces of com-
pression, organisation and interiorisation, under which the bio-
logical synthesis of reflection operates, do not at any moment

307

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

relax their pressure on the stuff of mankind. Hence the possi-
bility of foreseeing with certainty ([fall goes well) certain precise
directions of the future. 1 But, in virtue of its very nature, as
we must not forget, the arrangement of great complexes (that
is to say, of states of greater and greater improbability, even
though closely linked together) does not operate in the universe
(least of all in man) except by two related methods : (i) the
groping utilisation of favourable cases (whose appearance is
provoked by the play of large numbers) and (ii) in a second
phase, reflective invention. And what docs that amount to if
not that, however persistent and imperious the cosmic energy
of involution may be in its activity, it finds itself intrinsically
influenced in its effects by two uncertainties related to the double
play — chance at the bottom and freedom at the top ? Let me add,
however, that in the case of very large numbers (such, for instance,
as the human population) the process tends to ' unfallibilise '
itself, inasmuch as the likelihood of success grows on the lower
side (chance) while that of rejection and error diminishes on the
other side (freedom) with the multiplication of the elements
engaged. 2

b. As regards the value of the spirit, I would like to say that
from the phenomenal point of view, to which I systematically
confine myself, matter and spirit do not present themselves as
' things ' or ' natures ' but as simple related variables, of which
it behoves us to determine not the secret essence but the curve
in function of space and time. And I recall that at this level of
reflection ' consciousness ' presents itself and demands to be
treated, not as a sort of particular and subsistent entity, but as
an ' effect ', as the ' specific effect ' of complexity.

1 This for instance; that nothing could stop man in his advance to social
unification, towards the development of machinery and automation (liberators
of the spirit), towards ' trying all ' and ' thinking aJJ " right to the very end.

2 For a Christian believer it is interesting to note that the fuial success of
hominisation (and thus cosmic involution) is positively guaranteed by the
' redeeming virtue ' of the God incarnate in his creation. But this takes us
beyond the plan of phenomenology.

308

POSTSCRIPT

Now, within these limits, modest as they are, something very
important seems to me to be furnished by experience in favour of
the speculations of metaphysics.

On one side, when once we have admitted the above-
mentioned transposition of the concept of consciousness, nothing
any longer stops us from prolonging downwards towards the
lower complexities under an invisible form the spectrum of the
' within '. In other words, the ' psychic ' shows itself subtending
(at various degrees of concentration) the totality of the pheno-
menon.

On the other side, followed upward towards the very large
complexes, the same ' psychic ' element from its first appearance
in beings, manifests, in relation to its matrix of ' complexity ',
a growing tendency to mastery and autonomy. At the origins
of life, it would seem to have been the focus of arrangement
(F 1) which, in each individual element, engenders and controls
its related focus of consciousness (F 2). But, higher up, the
equilibrium is reversed. Quite clearly, first from the ' individual
threshold of reflection ' — if not before — it is F 2 which begins
to take charge (by ' invention ') of the progress of F 1. Then,
higher still, that is to say at the approaches (conjectured) of
collective reflection, we find F 2 apparently breaking away
from its temporo-spatial frame to join up with the supreme
and universal focus Omega. After emergence comes emersion.
In the perspectives of cosmic involution, not only does con-
sciousness become co-extensive with the universe, but the uni-
verse rests in equilibrium and consistency, in the form of thought,
on a supreme pole of interiorisation.

What finer experimental basis could we have on which to
found metaphysically the primacy of the spirit ?
c. Lastly, to put an end once and for all to the fears of
' pantheism ', constantly raised by certain upholders of traditional
spirituality as regards evolution, how can we fail to see that, in the
case of a converging universe such as I have delineated, far from
being bom from the fusion and confusion of the elemental centres
it assembles, the universal centre of unification (precisely to

309

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

fulfil its motive, collective and stabilising function) in use be
conceived as pre-existing and transcendent. A very real ' pan-
theism ' if you like (in the etymological meaning of the word)
but an absolutely legitimate pantheism — for if, in the last resort,
the reflective centres of the world are effectively ' one with
God ', this state is obtained not by identification (God becoming
all) but by the differentiating and communicating action of love
(God all in everyone). And that is essentially orthodox and
Christian.

3io

APPENDIX

SOME REMARKS ON

THE PLACE AND PART OF EVIL

IN A WORLD IN EVOLUTION

Throughout the long discussions we have been through, one
point may perhaps have intrigued or even shocked the reader.
Nowhere, if I am not mistaken, have pain or wrong been spoken
of. Does that mean that, from the point of view I have adopted,
evil and its problem have faded away and no longer count in the
structure of the world ? If that were so, the picture of the uni-
verse here presented might seem over-simplified or even faked.

My answer (or, if you like, my excuse) to this frequent
reproach of naive or exaggerated optimism is that, as my aim
in this book has been limited to bringing out the positive essence
of the biological process of hominisation, I have not (and this
in the interests of clarity and simplicity) considered it necessary
to provide the negative of the photograph. What good would it
have done to have drawn attention to the shadows on the
landscape, or to stress the depths of the abysses between the
peaks ? Surely they were obvious enough. I have assumed that
what I have omitted could nevertheless be seen. And it would
be a complete misunderstanding to interpret the view here
suggested as a sort of human idyll rather than as the cosmic
drama that I have attempted to present.

True, evil has not hitherto been mentioned, at least explicitly.
But on the other hand surely it inevitably seeps out through
every nook and cranny, through every joint and sinew of the
system in which I have taken my stand.

First : evil of disorder and failure. Right up to its reflective

3ii

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

zones we have seen the world proceeding by means of groping
and chance. Under this heading alone — even up to the human
level on which chance is most controlled — how many failures
have there been for one success, how many days of misery for
one hour's joy, how many sins for a solitary saint ? To begin
with we find physical lack-of-arrangement or derangement on
the material level ; then suffering, which cuts into the sentient
flesh ; then, on a still higher level, wickedness and the torture
of spirit as it analyses itself and makes choices. Statistically, at
every degree of evolution, we find evil always and everywhere,
forming and reforming implacably in us and around us. Neces-
sarium est ut scandala eveniant. This is relentlessly imposed by the
play of large numbers at the heart of a multitude undergoing
organisation.

Second : evil of decomposition. This is no more than a form
of the foregoing, for sickness and corruption invariably result
from some unhappy chance. It is an aggravated and doubly
fatal form, it must be added, inasmuch as, with living creatures,
death is the regular, indispensable condition of the replacement
of one individual by another along a phyletic stem. Death — the
essential lever in the mechanism and upsurge of life.

Third : evil oj solitude and anxiety. This is the great anxiety
(peculiar to man) of a consciousness wakening up to reflection
in a dark universe in which light takes centuries and centuries
to reach it — a universe we have not yet succeeded in under-
standing either in itself, or in its demands on us.

Lastly, the least tragic perhaps, because it exalts us, though
none the less real : the evil of growth, by which is expressed in
us, in the pangs of childbirth, the mysterious law which, from
the humblest chemism to the highest syntheses of the spirit,
makes all progress in the direction of increased unity express
itself in terms of work and effort.

Indeed, if we regard the march of the world from this stand-
point (i.e. not that of its progress but that of its risks and the
efforts it requires) we soon see, under the veil of security and
harmony which — viewed from on high — envelop the rise of

312

APPENDIX

man, a particular type of cosmos in which evil appears neces-
sarily and as abundantly as you like in the course of evolution
— not by accident (which would not much matter) but through
the very structure of the system. A universe which is involuted
and interioriscd, but at the same time and by the same token a
universe which labours, which sins, and which suffers. Arrange-
ment and centration : a doubly conjugated operation which,
like the scaling of a mountain or the conquest of the air, can
only be effected objectively if it is rigorously paid for — for
reasons and at charges which, if only we knew them, would
enable us to penetrate the secret of the world around us.

Suffering and failure, tears and blood : so many by-products
(often precious, moreover, and re-utilisable) begotten by the
noosphere on its way. This, in final analysis is, what the spectacle
of the world in movement reveals to our observation and
reflection at the first stage. But is that really all ? Is there
nothing else to see ? In other words, is it really sure that, for an
eye trained and sensitised by light other than that of pure science,
the quantity and the malice of evil hie et nunc, spread through
the world, does not betray a certain excess, inexplicable to our
reason, if to the normal effect of evolution is not added the extra-
ordinary effect of some catastrophe or primordial deviation ?

On this question, in all loyalty, I do not feel I am in a position
to take a stand : in any case, would this be the place to do so ?
One point, however, seems clear to me, and it is sufficient for
the moment as an orientation : that hi this case (just as in that
of the ' creation ' of the human soul — see note p. 169), complete
liberty is not only conceded but offered by the phenomenon to
theology, so that it may add precision and depth (should it wish
to) to the findings and suggestions — always ambiguous beyond
a certain point — furnished by experience.

In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even
in the view of the mere biologist, the human epic resembles
nothing so much as a way of the Cross.

Rome, October 28, 1948

313

Index

Aborigines, Australian, 197, 206
Additivity, 108, no, 141, 225
Africa, 128, 152, 158, 184, 185, 187 n.,

196, 197, 202, 206, 210
Africanthropus, 196
Agriculture, 205, 214
Aino, 198
Alaska, 205

Albuminoids, 87, 148, 250
America, 124, 125, 126 n., 152, 157,

202, 206, 209, 212
Amitotic division, 104
Amphibians, 129, 130, 147
Amphioxus, 131
Animalcules, 40
Annelida, 132
Anthropogenesis, 42, 50, 138, 212,

241
Anthropoids, 158, 160, 163, 168, 184-

185, 187 n., 189, 193. 193 n., 196
Anthropology, 163, 187, 198, 199-

200, 241, 243
Anthropomorphs, 187 n.
Aplacentals, 126 (see also Marsupials)
Aristogenesis, 160
Aristotle, 133, 216
Arizona, 152

Arthropods, 124, 132, 145, 153
Artiodactyla, 124-5
Asia, 152, 210
Astronomy, 67 n., 99, 134, 227, 274,

300-1
Atmosphere, 68, 68 n., 71, 182
Atom, 39, 40-9, 52, J9, 69, 94, 104,

149, 268, 272, 300
Aurignacian man, 200, 203
Australia, 126, 185
Australopithecus, 185, 187 n.

Bacteria, 81, 82 n., 92, 102, 107, 132
Barysphere, 68, 71, 182
Belief, 283-4, 292-4 (see aho Faith)
Benson, 275

Biochemistry, 82

Biogenesis, 139-40, 147-8, 166, 181,
276, 298

Biology, 48, 61, 79, 94, 95, 99, 103-
110, 113, 121, 131-2, 138, 140 n.,
145-6, 148, 149 n., 151, 159, 163,
164, 166, 172, 175, 178, 218, 223,
225, 240, 242, 244, 247, 268
277 n., 281-2, 283, 291-2, 293.
301, 303 n., 305, 311, 313

Biosphere, 78, 95-6, 101-2, 104, 112,
118, 132, 148, 151, 153, 160, 182,
218, 239, 251, 273, 275, 303

Bode, 196

Bovidae, 125

Brain, 144-6. 158, 159-60. 170, 177.
178, 181, 183, 188, 194, 194 n.,
198, 203, 249-50, 278

Breuil, H., 214

Brunschvig, 249 n.

Bryozoa, 107

Buffon, 217

Burial, 198, 202

Camelidae, 125

Carbon, 95, 244

Carboniferous era, 136

Carnivores, 124, 125, 128, 145, 150,

157. 139
Carrel, A., 281
Caves, 202-3
Cell, 79-83, 86-109, 132. 147, 166,

173. 225. 244, 268
Centre, 60, 65-6, 89, 104, 165, 173,

258-64, 267-72, 284, 287-8, 289,

291, 294, 309, 313
Cerebralisation, set Brain
Cervidac, 125
Cetacea, 125, 159
Chalicotheridae, 124
Chance, 149 n., 308, 312
Chemistry, 71, 140, 219, 273
Chimpanzee, 158, 185

314

INDEX

China, 184, 193, 197, 209-1 1

Chordates, 131, 132, 144

Christ, 294, 297

Christianity, 211, 291-9, 308 n., 310
(see also Religion)

Christogenesis, 297

Chromosomes, 87, 139, 277

Church, 296

Civilisation, 204-5, 269-70

Coelenterata, 132

Collective, Collectivity, 41-2, 246,
254, 258, 261, 262-3, 265, 267

Collingwood, R. G., 52 n., 216 n.

Communism, 257

Complexity, 43, 48, 48 n., 64, 66, 86-
87. 177. 301-2. 308-9

Comte, 57 n.

Condylarthra, 144, 158

Consciousness, 43, 47. 55-7. 59-<5i.
72-4, 87-89, 143-52, 153. 155.
160, 164-9, 173-4. 177, 178, 181,
212, 219, 221-2, 224, 225, 229-
32, 241, 243, 246, 251, 256-9,
261-2, 264-5, 271-2, 276, 285-6,
289, 291, 294, 295, 300-4, 308-9,
312 (see also Intelligence, Mind,
Psyche, Radial (internal) energy,
Soul, Spirit, Within of things)

Convergence, see under Centre,
Omega point. Unity

Cosmogenesis, 47, 221, 276, 297, 304,
307

Cosmos, 43-5, 217

Cournot, 122 n.

Cretaceous period, 136

Critical points, 78, 88, 231

Cromagnon man, 199

Crossopterygian, 130

Crystallisation, 69-70

Cuenot, 134

Cytology, 80

Cytoplasm, 79, 87

Darwin, 82, 120, 138, 149 n., 218, 219
Death, 237, 270, 272, 273, 275, 304,

307.312
Descartes, 166
Determinism, 53

Devonian level, 131
Diatom shells, 40
Dinocerata, 144
Dinosaurs, 128, 129, 144
Dryopithecus, 158
Dualism, 64

Duration, 46, 47, 77, 219-20, 228 (see
also Space-time)

Echinodermata, 132

Economics, 213-14, 306

Ego, 172, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263

Egotism, 230, 237-8, 244, 263

Egypt, 210, 211

Electro-magnetic waves, 240, 301

Electron, 41, 45, 48, 102

Embryogenesis, 78, 171, 189, 200

Endomorphosis, 209

Energetics, 283, 290

Energy, 40, 42-3, 45, 50-2, 62-6, 68-
70, 72, 98, 102, 141, 231, 232,
232 n., 241, 250, 253, 258, 264-
72, 274, 276-7, 280, 281, 288,
291, 292, 297, 308
radial (internal) energy, 64-6, 72,
88, 89, 143, 147, 149, 168-9, 176,
239, 244, 253, 265, 269, 272 (see
also Consciousness, Intelligence,
Mind, Psyche, Soul, Spirit,
Within of things)
tangential (external) energy, 64-6,
88, 143. H7, 149. 169. 239. 272

Entropy, 51, 66, 271, 272, 290 (see
also Thermodynamics)

Enzymes, 95

Eocene period, 145, 158, 189

Epicurus, 40

Ethics, 62, 164

Eugenics, 282-3

Evil, 249, 288, 289, 311-13

External energy, see Energy

Fabre, 155

Faith, 229, 234, 245, 283-4 (see aho

Belief)
Finalism, 53, 139, 301
Freedom, 307-8

315

INDEX

Galileo, 217

Genes, 209, 225, 250

Genesis, 49, 99, 100, 218, 228

Genetics, 106

Genotypes, 140

Geogenesis, 148, 181, 273

Geology, 100-1, 122, 125, 136, 164,

182, 183
Germs, 97, 106, 109, 225
God, 292-7, 307, 308 n., 310
Goncourts, 275
Gorilla, 158, 185
Granulation, 49, 307
Graves, see under Burial
Greece, 211, 257
Gregory, K. W., 189
Groping, no, 118, 223-4, 242, 250,

281, 308, 312

Haldane, J. B. S., 57 n., 269 n.

Hegel, 294

Heidelberg man, 191 n., 196

Herbivores, 124, 125, 128

Heredity, 108, 178, 179 n., 224-6, 277,
302

Hologenesis, 187

Hominidae, 163, 191-2, 195-6, 241

Hominisation, 164, 169 n., 174, 180,
182, 184, 186, 187, 189, 194, 198,
205, 207, 208, 215, 222, 226, 240,
243, 258, 264, 272, 276, 282, 292,
306, 307, 308 n., 311

Homo faber, 195

Homo sapiens, 199, 200, 206, 278

Hormones, 250, 277 n.

Huxley, Sir Julian, 221

Hydrogen, 45

Hydrosphere, 68, 71, 101, 182

Hydrozoa, 99

Hyper-personal (see Super personal)

Ice age, 201

Impersonal, the, 258, 260
Incarnation, 293, 295, 296
India, 158, 209, 211
Individualism, 238, 246, 263
Industry, 214-15, 230, 280
Infusoria, 105, 132

Insectivores, 124, 158

Insects, 99, 132, 145, 153-5, 178

Instinct, 155, 159, 167, 171, 175, 178,

180, 181, 282, 287, 303, 304
Intelligence, 167 n., 168, 171-4, 202,
216, 293 (sec also Consciousness,
Mind, Psyche, Radial (internal)
energy, Soul, Spirit, Within of
things)
Interior of things, see Within of

things
Internal energy, see Energy
Invention, 223-5, 3°3. 306". 308
Involution, 72, 73, 300-4, 307-9, 313
Isolation, 237-8, 244

Java, 1 91-6
John, St., 293, 297
Jurassic period, 128

Karma, 210

Knowledge, 46, 164-6, 167 n., 248-
250

Lamarck, 82, 120, 149 n., 179 n.
Laplace, 218

Law of consciousness and complexity,
45 "-. 287, 300-2, 304

of energy, 50-1, 66

of growth, 58
Laws, numerical, 50-2
Layer, 127-8, 130-2, 136, 144
Life, Tree of, 97 n., 99, 103, 122, 128,
134. 137. 140, 144, 145-6, 157,

I67, 175, 177, 182, I85, 200, 222,

238,275, 277, 303
Linnaeus, 83, 133, 163
Lithosphere, 68, 71, 102, 182
Living mass, 103, 112
Love, 233 n., 264-7, 269, 271, 289,

291, 295-6, 298, 310
Lower Quaternary period, 191, 196

Magdalenian man, 203

Magma, 99, 100

Malaya, 158, 184, 197

Mammals, 122-30, 136, 137, 144, 147,

316

INDEX

152. 153. 155-7. 159. i<5o, 200,
264

Marsupials, 124 n., 126, 144

Marx, 261

Mass-formation, see under Planetisa-
tion

Mathematics, 61, 219, 249, 268

Matthew, 275

Maya, 211

Mechanisation, 257

Mediterranean, 212

Megamolecule, 81-6, 92, 93, 96, 108,
139, 301

Megasynthesis, 107, 243-5, 251

Mendel, 108

Mesopotamia, 210, 211

Metazoa, 60, 81, 107, 132, 183, 244

Micro-molecules, 104, 108

Micro-organisms, 80, 81-3

Middle Jurassic period, 127

Middle Palaeolithic period, 198

Middle Quaternary period, 198

Mind, 176, 215, 240, 243, 249, 253,
256, 257, 259-60, 271, 278, 282,
288 (see also Consciousness, In-
telligence, Psyche, Radial (in-
ternal) energy, Soul Spirit,
Within of things)

Miocene era, 144

Mitotic division, 104

Molecules, 41, 45, 49, 69, 70, 73, 78,
81-2, 90. 94. 99. 139. 149. 244,
264, 268

Monkeys, 157-8

Monogenism, 122 n., 186 n., 188 n.

Monophyletism, 93, 186 n., 188 n.,
189

Mousterian man, 198, 200

Multiplication, 104-5, 109, 113

Mutation, 108, 118, 150, 171, 180,
187, 189, 195, 223, 241

Mysticism, 284-5, 295, 296

National-Socialism, 257
Neanderthaloids, 185, 196-202
Neolithic era, 203-12, 240, 245, 252
Neutron, 48
Nicolas of Cusa, 264

Nile, 210, 211

Noogenesis, 181-2, 216, 221, 229, 230,
255, 257, 260, 261, 270, 273, 286,

287, 289, 290, 297
Noosphere, 73 n., 180-4, 191, 206,

209, 212, 222, 225-6, 239, 251,
252, 259, 260, 264, 269, 273-6,
278, 286-9, 295, 297
Nucleus of cell, 80, 87, 91

Oceania, 202

Oligocene era, 189

Omega point, 57 n., 257-64, 268-72,

288, 291, 294, 298, 307, 309
Omnivores, 124, 158
Ontogenesis, 48, 100, 170, 171, 226
Organic matter, 70, 79, 92
Orthogenesis, 108-9, i"i 113. 125,

138, 140 n., 145, 151, 160, 180-1
Osborn, 160, 189

Palaeolithic era, 206

Palaeontology, 81, 119, 124, 125, 128,

140 n., 144, 147, 159, 184, 185,

195, 199 n., 2oi
Palaeozoic era, 158
Pantheism, 262, 267, 294, 309
Pascal, 40, 44, 217, 233
Pasteur, 97, 99
Paul, St., 293-4, 297
Peking man, see under Sinanthropus
Permian period, 128, 129, 136
Personalisation, personality, 172-3,

257-64, 265-6, 284
Phenotypes, 140
Photon, 48
Phylogenesis, 48, 100, 138, 194-5,

198, 207-8, 224, 225, 226, 241,

242-3
Physics, 42-3, 46-7, 54-5, 56, 57 n.,

65 n., 68, 79, 98, 103, 137, 140 n„

148, 149 n., 163, 169, 211, 217,

219, 220, 247, 249 n., 268, 271,

274, 281, 283, 290, 300-1, 302,

303 n., 305 11.
Pisciform.es, 130-1
Pithecanthropus, 193-8, 199 n.
Placentals, 125-7, r 44

317

INDEX

Planetisation, 243 n., 250 n., 252

Plato, 264, 294

Platyrrhini, 126, 157

Pleistocene era, 193, 197 n.

Pliocene era, 126 11. , 144, 156, 158,
159, 187, 189

Polanyi, M., 179 n.

Polycladida, 157

Polymerisation, 70-1, 239

Polynesians, 209

Polyphyletism, 93, 139 n., 187

Porifera, 132

Pouchet, 97

Pre-anthropoids, 189

Pre-biosphere, 74

Precambrian era, 133, 137

Pre-consciousness, 88

Pre-history, 206

Pre-hominids, 191, 194-5, 197. 198,
199, 200, 255

Pre-life, 57, 73, 80, 88, 96, 303

Primates, 157-60, 168, 181, 185

Proboscidia, 125, 157, 159

Profusion, 109-10

Protein, 73, 77, 82, 85

Proton, 48

Protoplasm, 77, 82, 87, 91, 95, 97,
101, 102, 141, 147

Protozoa, 60, 81, 99, 132, 218

Pseudo-neanderthaJoids, 199, 200

Psyche, psycliism, 151, 154, 164-8,
173. 175. I7 8 . 208, 239, 241, 301-
302 (see also Consciousness, In-
telligence, Mind, Radial (inter-
nal) energy, Soul, Spirit, Within
of things)

Psychogenesis, 148, 181

Psychology, 150, 164, 176, 267, 283

Psychozoic era, 183

Pterosaurians, 128

Quantum, 43, 45-6, 51, 66, 102, 225,

277
Quaternary era, 126 n., 201, 203

RaciaJism, 238

Radial energy, sec Energy

Radiation, 42, 70, 274, 301

Reason, 283, 285

Reflection, 165-90, 196, 203, 204, 215,

227, 228, 230, 246, 249 n., 250-

i, 269, 271, 276, 283, 291, 302-

12 (see also Thought)
Reflection, threshold of, 88, 164-80,

186-7, 219, 260, 276, 285, 302-4,

309
Relativity, 47 n., 83
Religion, 219, 278, 283-5, 294-6 (see

also Christianity)
Renan, 284

Reproduction, 104-5, JI 3. I 79< 302
Reptiles, 128-30, 145, 147
Research, 278-83, 306
Rhodesian man, 199
Rodents, 125, 126 n.

Science, 265, 268, 276-85, 288, 296,
297

Secondary era, 125, 145

Sex, 106, 179, 193, 256, 264

Silurian, 131

Simians, 193

Sinanthropus, 185, 191-8

Socialisation, society, 106-7, 1 17-1 8,
132, 145, 179, 203-5, 208, 214,
223-4, 227, 241, 242, 268, 277,
282, 284, 304-7

Solo man, 198

Soul, 63, 88, 150, t68, 176-7, 179,
183, 202, 215, 220, 222, 233, 241,
748, 257-60, 265, 268-70, 272,
281, 313 (see also Consciousness,
Intelligence, Mind, Psyche,
Radial (internal) energy, Spirit,
Within of things)

Space, 216-9, 226-9, 240, 252, 259,
260, 269-71, 273, 289, 290, 305,
308 (see also Space-time)

Space-time, 47, 216-22, 227, 232, 247,
254, 258, 259, 267, 296, 303 (see
also Duration)

Spinoza, 294

Spirit, 62-3, 176, 180, 211, 239, 244-5,
253-4, 266, 269, 273, 285, 287,
307-9 (sec also Consciousness,
Intelligence, Mind, Psyche,

3»

INDEX

Radial (internal) energy, Soul,
Within of things)
Spy cranium, 198
Steinheim man, 199
Stuff of the universe, see Universe,

stuff of
Super-centration, 259
-consciousness, 251
-human, 244, 260
-individual, 247
-man, 238
-matter, 267

-personal, 254, 259, 260, 263 n.
-sou], 233
Survival, 268-9

Symbiosis, 94, 149 n., 209, 244
Synthesis, 51, 70, 73, 268, 270, 272,
281, 283, 287, 289, 294, 298,
307

Tangential energy, see under Energy
Tertiary era, 125-6, 136, 144, 157-9,

168, 184
Tetrapods, 127, 136, 183
Theology, 169 n., 313
Theriomorphs, 128
Thermodynamics, 51, 65, 72 (see also

Entropy]
Things, within of, see Within of

things
without of, see Without of things
Thought, 64, 160-84, 195, 198, 203,

215, 220, 222, 2304, 339-43. 248-

53, 260, 263, 266, 271-3, 275,

278, 281-3, 285-90, 304, 309

(see also Reflection)
Threshold of reflection, see Reflection,

threshold of
Time, 77, 101, 140, 152, 216-19, 228-

9, 252, 259-60, 269-71, 273,

289-90, 305, 308 (see also Space-
time)

Totalitarianism, 256-7

Totum, 43-5, 47

Transformism, 120, 122, 138, 140,
151, 218, 219

Tree of life, see Life, tree of

Triassic era, 128, 136

Trinil man, 193-9

Trois-Freres cave, 202

Unanimity, 248, 251-3, 269, 288
Unity, 41-3, 56, 74. 112. 139 n., 222-

6, 241, 243-4, 251, 262-8, 272,

284, 289, 293-4
Universe, stuff of, 39-52, 55, 64, 67,

87, 94. 104, 143. 218, 251, 272,

281, 307
Upper Palaeolithic man, 200, 202, 204
Upper Quaternary era, 203

Vegetables, 124, 132-3, 153
Vertebrates, 83-4, 99, 129-32, 136,

153-7. 179
Villefranchian era, 193 n., 196

Wave, 102-3, 224, 225, 240, 301

Wegener, 218

Wells, H. G., 270 n., 275

Within of things, 53-66, 71-4, 87-9,
103, 143, 146, 149 n., 158, 164,
166, 175, 239, 243, 264-5, 309
(see also Consciousness, Intelli-

?;ence, Mind, Psyche, Radial
internal) energy, Soul, Spirit)
Without of things, 55-6, 58-64, 68-71,
89. 103, 143. i4<5, 164. 175, 243

Zoology, 84, 114, 137, 163, 184, 187-
8, 194. 198. 223, 241

319

"While other thinkers announced the futility of life and the death
of God, Teilhard de Chardin was passionately wringing from
the earth answers to man's perennial questions: 'Who are we?
Why are we?' " —Washington Post Book World

Visionary theologian and evolutionary theorist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
applied his whole life, his tremendous intellect, and his great spiritual
faith to building a philosophy that would reconcile religion with the
scientific theory of evolution. In this timeless book, which contains the
quintessence of his thought, Teilhard argues that just as living organisms
sprung from inorganic matter and evolved into ever more complex thinking
beings, humans are evolving toward an "omega point" —defined by Teilhard
as a convergence with the Divine.

"Brilliant I cannot imagine anyone reading this book who

will not be profoundly influenced by it, and who will not wish to
read it several times over." — New York Times Book Review

"A most extraordinary book, of far-reaching significance for the
understanding of man's place in the universe." — Abraham Heschel

"[Teilhard's] magnum opus . . . set down the philosophical
framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness." — Wired

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was born in France and ordained a
Jesuit priest. Trained as a paleontologist, Teilhard codiscovered the celebrated
"Peking Man" fossils. The Phenomenon of Man is his best-known work.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SIR JULIAN HUXLEY, WINNER OF THE DARWIN MEDAL

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